
Class \^^.3JM1 

Book i^ 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSITS 



ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 
SELF-RELIANCE 
COMPENSATION 



BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



EDITED WITH NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY BY 

ORREN HENRY SMITH 

GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON 



NEW YORK •:• CINCINNATI •:• CHICAGO 

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 






-^^V 



Copyrignt, 1893 and 191 1, by 
American Book Company 



Em. Amer. Sch. 
w. p. 1 



The three essays of Emerson included in this volume are printed 
by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Messrs. Houghton, 
Mifflin & Company, the authorized publishers of Mr, Emerson's works. 



IP^^ 



©cuasasee 



INTRODUCTION. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet, essayist, and philosopher, was 
born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was the second of five sons 
of the Rev. Wilham Emerson, minister of the First (Congrega- 
tional) Church in Boston. His mother was Ruth Haskins, a 
woman of strong character and superior mental abilities. He 
had a minister for an ancestor for eight generations back, either 
on the paternal or the maternal side. Thus he inherited his spir- 
itual and intellectual tendencies from a long line of distinguished 
progenitors. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a woman of rare 
intellectual attainments, was one of his early companions and ex- 
erted a remarkable influence over his development. 

Emerson began his studies at the public grammar school at 
the age of eight, and four years later he attended the Latin 
School. In 1 8 1 7 he entered Harvard. He was not distinguished 
for proficiency in the studies of the curriculum, but he was superior 
to most of his classmates in his knowledge of general literature. 
He was especially interested in the study of Greek and history, 
and much of his time was spent in the library. He graduated 
in 1821. 

For five years after leaving college Emerson taught school. 
In 1823 he began to study for the ministry under Dr. Channing. 
He was ''approbated to preach" in 1826 by the Middlesex 

S 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

Association of Ministers, but owing to ill health he did not enter 
immediately upon his pubHc duties, but spent the following winter 
in Florida. On his return from the South he preached in New 
Bedford, Northampton, Concord, and Boston. On March ii, 
1829, he was ordained as a colleague of the Rev. Henry Ware, 
minister of the Second (Congregational Unitarian) Church in 
Boston. Eighteen months later. Dr. Ware resigned and the 
pastoral duties fell upon Emerson. 

In September, 1829, he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa 
Tucker. Their married life was brief, as Mrs. Emerson died of 
consumption in February, 1832. 

Emerson soon became troubled with doubts regarding his 
duties as a minister, and as sincerity was always his guiding star, 
he felt it his duty to proclaim these doubts to his congregation. 
Accordingly in September, 1832, he delivered a sermon on the 
Lord's Supper, in which he stated his scruples against adminis- 
tering that rite. As he and his congregation differed radically 
in these views, he resigned his pastorate and retired from public 
preaching. 

In 1833 he visited Europe for the first time. There he met 
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, and formed with the last- 
named a lifelong friendship which resulted in their famous 
correspondence. 

In the winter of 1833-34 he returned to the United States and 
began his career as a lecturer. At this period of his hfe he Kved 
with Dr. Ripley in the '' Old Manse," afterwards made famous 
by Hawthorne. The first lectures he delivered were '' Water " 
and '' The Relation of Man to the Globe." These were followed 
by three lectures on his European tour. 

In 1834 he began his series of biographical lectures on Michael 



INTRODUCTION, 7 

Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund Burke. 
Those on Michael Angelo and George Fox were pubHshed later 
in the '' North American Review." 

In September, 1835, he was married to Miss Lydia Jackson 
of Plymouth, Mass. They went to live in ''the plain, square, 
wooden house," in Concord, v/hich was Emerson's home for the 
rest of his life. 

During the next three winters Emerson delivered three courses 
of lectures in Boston : ten on English literature, in 1835 ; twelve 
on the philosophy of history, in 1836 ; and ten on human culture, 
in 1837. 

In 1836 he wrote the ''Concord Hymn" for the dedication 
ceremonies at the monument raised in honor of the Concord fight. . 
It is one of the most beautiful poems he has written. 

In 1836 his first volume, " Nature," — a philosophic essay full 
of poetic thoughts, — was published anonymously. It was quite 
different from anything Emerson had written before, and it did 
not meet with a favorable reception. It was too vague for pop- 
ular comprehension, and the time was not ripe for its full appre- 
ciation. It took five years to sell five hundred copies of it in the 
United States. 

In 1836 the Symposium, or Transcendental Club, was organ- 
ized, and Emerson became an active member. Among its other 
members were James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, Bronson 
Alcott, Elizabeth P. Peabody, and Margaret Fuller. They dis- 
cussed, besides a variety of other topics, religious justice, truth, 
mysticism, and the development of American genius. 

From the last-named, subject Emerson probably received the 
impulse which prompted him in 1837 to deliver his oration 
entitled " The American Scholar " before the Phi Beta Kappa 



8 IN TROD UC TION. 

Society at Cambridge. The address was received by the audi- 
ence with the utmost enthusiasm and approval. 

On July 24, 1838, Emerson delivered an oration on Hterary 
ethics before the literary societies at Dartmouth College. 

In the winter of 1838-39 he gave a course of ten lectures, — 
"The Doctrine of the Soul,'' ''Home," ''The School," "Love," 
"Genius," "The Protest," "Tragedy," "Comedy," "Duty," 
" Demonology." 

His next address was " The Method of Nature," delivered be- 
fore the Society of the Adelphi in Waterville, Me., Aug. 1 1, 1841. 
Other addresses delivered about this time were " Man, the Re- 
former," "Lecture on the Times," "The Transcendentalist," and 
"The Conservative." 

In July, 1840, a transcendental magazine called "The Dial" 
began its career under the editorship of Margaret Fuller. Emer- 
son soon succeeded her as editor, and he contributed numerous 
articles to the paper. It was not a financial success, and was 
abandoned in 1844. 

In 1 84 1 Emerson's first volume of collected essays was pub- 
hshed. This volume now includes the following essays : " His- 
tory," " Self-ReHance," " Compensation," " Spiritual Laws," 
"Love," "Friendship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The Over- 
Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," "Art," "The Young American." 
The last named was not published till 1844, but it now forms 
part of the " First Series of Essays." 

In February, 1842, Emerson wrote the pathetic "Threnody," 
on the death of his dearly beloved son. In 1 844 he delivered, 
in Concord, an address on the emancipation of the negroes in 
the British West Indies. 

In 1844 the "Second Series of Essays" appeared. It includes: 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

"The Poet,'^ ^^ Experience," '' Character,' ' "Manners," "Gifts," 
"Nature," " PoUtics," " NominaUst and Realist," and "New 
England Reformers." 

In 1847 Emerson's first volume of poems was published. 
This was chiefly a collection of poems which had appeared be- 
fore, most of them in " The Dial." 

In October, 1847, he sailed for Europe on an English lecture 
tour. Many of the lectures he delivered on this trip were pub- 
lished in a volume, " Representative Men," which appeared in 
1850. It consists of a series of character sketches or mental 
portraits, each designed to represent a class. The essays are : 
"Lives of Great Men;" "Plato, or the Philosopher;" "Plato, 
New Readings;" " Swedenborg, or the Mystic;" "Montaigne, 
or the Skeptic;" "Shakespeare, or the Poet;" "Napoleon, or 
the Man of the World ;" " Goethe, or the Writer." 

In 1849 he returned to the United States. In 1850 Ke 
signed the call for the first Woman's Rights Convention. In 
1852, conjointly with James Freeman Clarke and William 
Ellery Channing, he published the " Memoirs of Margaret 
Fuller OssoU." 

In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of 
Antislavery Addresses, delivered in Boston, and in the same 
year he delivered an address before the Antislavery Party in New 
York. The plan he proposed was to buy the slaves from the 
owners and then liberate them. 

" English Traits," the result of his observations in England, 

i was pubhshed in 1856. In November, 1857, the "Atlantic 

I Monthly " began its career in Boston with James Russell Lowell 

as editor. Many of the former contributors of "The Dial" 

wrote for this paper, among them Emerson, who contributed to 



lO INTRODUCTION, 

it some of his best poems. The '' Essay on Persian Poetry " was 
pubhshed in this paper in 1858. 

" The Conduct of Life " appeared in i860. It contains essays 
on '' Fate," '' Power," '' Wealth," '' Culture," '' Manners," '' Be- 
havior," ''Worship," ''Beauty," "Illusions," " Considerations by 
the Way." When we consider that twenty-five hundred copies 
of this book were sold in a few days we perceive how much 
Emerson had grown in favor in the twenty years since the publi- 
cation of his first volume. 

About this time a new paper called " The Dial " was started 
in Cincinnati, for which Emerson wrote several articles. In 1862 
he delivered an address at Boston on the Emancipation Procla- 
mation. The " Boston Hymn" was read by him in Music Hall, 
Jan. I, 1863. 

" Voluntaries " was pubhshed in the "Atlantic Monthly " in 
1863, and "Saadi" in 1864, "My Garden" in 1866, and "Ter- 
minus " in 1867. These poems and others were collected in 
1867 in a volume entitled " May Day and Other Pieces." 

In 1866 Emerson received the degree of LL.D. from Har- 
vard University, and in 1867 he was elected to their board of 
overseers. In the same year he delivered an oration on the 
Progress of Culture before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Cam- 
bridge. This year practically marked the close of his literary 
career. Most of the works of note which appeared at a later 
date were published from manuscript written by him at an ear- 
lier period. 

In 1868-70 he deUvered a series of lectures at Harvard Uni- 
versity on the " Natural History of the Intellect." " Society and 
Solitude," a new collection of essays, was published in 1870. The 
essays include : " Society and Sohtude," " Civilization," "Art," 



INTRODUCTION, li 

"Eloquence,'' "Domestic Life," "Farming," "Weeks and 
Days," " Books," " Clubs," " Courage," " Success," " Old Age." 

In 187 1, accompanied by his daughter Edith, he made a 
trip to California. In July, 1872, his house caught fire. The 
shock he received on this occasion greatly hastened his mental 
decline. He was induced to go to Europe for his health, and 
on his return he found his house perfectly restored to its for- 
mer condition by friends who had paid for it by voluntary 
subscriptions. 

In December, 1874, he edited "Parnassus," a collection of 
poems by British and American authors. In the same year 
" Letters and Social Aims " appeared, containing the following 
essays : " Poetry and Imagination," " Social Aims," " Elo- 
quence," " Resources," " The Comic," " Quotation and Origi- 
nality," " Progress of Culture," " Persian Poetry," " Inspiration," 
" Greatness," " ImmortaHty." 

On March 30, 1878, he delivered a lecture in the Old South 
Church, Boston, on the "Fortune of the Republic." "The 
Sovereignty of Ethics " was published in the " North American 
Review" in 1878. In May, 1879, he read his address on "The 
Preacher" in Divinity College, Harvard. In 1881 he read a 
paper on Carlyle before the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
essay on " Superlatives " appeared in the " Century " for 

)ruary, 1882. 

n April, 1882, Emerson caught a severe cold, which developed 

) pneumonia, of which he died on April 27. He was buried 

Poncord near the graves of Hawthorne and Thoreau. 

[n addition to many short poems hitherto unpublished, two 

umes of essays, " Miscellanies " and " Biographical Sketches," 

/e appeared since his death. 



12 INTRODUCTION, 

To understand Emerson's works, we must inquire into his re- 
ligious belief, since it permeates and colors all his writings. He 
belongs to the school of transcendentalism, but this word admits 
of many interpretations. Emerson himself defines it as '' modern 
idealism." '*The materialist," he tells us, "insists on facts, on 
history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of 
man ; the idealist, on the power of Thought and of Will, on in- 
spiration, on miracle, on individual culture. . . . The idealist 
takes his departure from his consciousness and reckons the world 
an appearance. . . . His thought, — that is the universe." 

His precise attitude as to the conception of the Deity is diffi- 
cult to define. He declares in one of his essays that '' there is a 
sublime and friendly destiny by which the human race is guided 
— the race never dying, the individual never spared — to results 
affecting masses and ages." 

Perhaps the following passage from Oliver Wendell Holmes 
will give us as good a conception as any, of Emerson's reHgious 
attitude : 

" His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with 
him. In all he did, in all he said, and, so far as all outward 
signs could show, in all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was 
his light and guide; through all nature he looked up to nature's 
God ; and if he did not worship the ' man Christ Jesus ' as 
churches of Christendom have done, he followed his footsj 
so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of \ 
as more like Christ than any man he had known." 

But, whatever we may think of his theological views, we c 
not fail to admire his ethics. He aimed to be a teacher of m 
a reformer of reformers. He preached by life as well as by \ 
a new code of morals. He was an ideahst, and he insisted 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

the application of idealism to the everyday matters of life. His 
was a courageous and hopeful nature. He had unbounded con- 
fidence in the power for good in the human soul, and he preached 
untiringly the worth of the moral sentiment. He explored every 
province of human Hfe and thought ; he lent his voice in behalf 
of all great public measures ; and he never lost an opportunity 
to prove himself a good citizen. His mission in life was to in- 
spire others, to make life nobler, purer, loftier. 

There is, perhaps, no writer regarding whom there is less con- 
sensus of opinion than of Emerson. The judgments formed of 
him are as various as the habits of thought in the critics. We 
may regard him in three phases : Emerson the essayist, Emerson 
the poet, and Emerson the philosopher and moral leader. In all 
these phases we find the most diverse opinions and criticisms 
regarding him. 

Some say there never before was such a writer, poet, sage ; 
others can find no sense in his writings and pronounce them 
mere empty words. One critic accords him a high place as a 
philosopher, but characterizes his poetry as inartistic and harsh ; 
another ranks him among the greatest poets, and says of him, 
** The great poets addressed him as one of themselves ; he was 
not of their audience, but of their choir;" while a third declares 
that his poetry is as devoid of Hfe as his philosophy of wisdom. 
We give a few of these criticisms by men whose opinions are 
valued. 

First let us hear what Oliver Wendell Holmes says: — 

\ ''The poet in Emerson never acciurately differentiated itself 

from the philosopher. . . . Emerson is so essentially a poet that 

whole pages of his are like so many litanies of alternating chants 

and recitations. His thoughts slip on and off their light rhythmic 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

robes just as the mood takes him. Many of the metrical pre- 
ludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract of the 
leading doctrine of the discourse. Emerson was not only a poet, 
but a very remarkable one. ... He was a man of intuition, of 
insight, a seer, a poet with a tendency to mysticism which renders 
him sometimes obscure and once in a while almost, if not quite, 
unintelligible. He made desperate work now and then with 
rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not 
a born singer. . . . After all our criticisms we have to recognize 
that there is a charm in his poems which cannot be defined any 
more than the fragrance of a rose or a hyacinth. ... No man 
would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his 
pages with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing 
out a lecture he was as punctiKous as Portia about the pound of 
flesh. When the lecture had served its purpose it came before 
the pubhc in the shape of an essay, but the essay never lost the 
character it borrowed from the conditions under which it was 
delivered ; it was a lay sermon." 

Now let us listen to Matthew Arnold : — 

''And, in truth, one of the legitimate poets, Emerson, in my 
opinion, is not. His poetry is interesting ; it makes one think, 
but it is not the poetry of one of the born poets. ... I do not, 
then, place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther 
and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the 
great men of letters. . . . Emerson has passages of noble and 
pathetic eloquence ; he has passages of shrewd and felicitous 
wit ; he has crisp epigram ; he has passages of exquisitely touched 
observation of nature. Yet he is not a great writer ; his style 
has not the requisite wholeness of good tissue. . . . Emerson 
cannot, I think, be called with justice a great philosophical 



IN TROD UCTION, 1 5 

writer. He cannot build ; his arrangement of philosophical ideas 
has no progress in it — no evolution ; he does not construct a 
philosophy." 

Lastly, the Rev. C. A. Bartol, criticising the critic, says : — 
'' Mr. Arnold, who has forgot the dreams and got so bravely 
over the supposed illusions of his youth, putting for them the 
depressing doubts and hopeless speculations of his age; while he 
prizes Emerson's spiritual substance, eschews as not good tissue 
his Kterary style. Moses, David, Paul, James, and Jesus, as 
reported by his amanuenses, under this self-confident critic's 
cleaver, must lose their heads as writers and authors on the same 
block. They, too, are no weavers of words whose work is figured 
by the loom; but brief, sententious, pictorial, ejaculatory, a 
quiver full of arrows being rather their type. Is there not a good 
prophetic and oracular as well as a didactic or dialectic style? " 

So we see that it is not safe to trust the opinion of any one 
critic. It is not always easy to understand Emerson ; his sen- 
tences are full of hidden meaning which cannot be detected at a 
glance ; they must be read and re-read to perceive the full drift 
of the thought ; but the thought in its fullness well repays us for 
the trouble. With unbiased mind and earnest purpose we must 
go to the storehouse of Emerson's works, take from thence all 
the material we can gather, and with this as the basis, each 
according to his understanding, form his own judgment. 

''The American Scholar" has been well called our literary 
declaration of independence. In it Emerson deplores the ten- 
dencies of Americans to devote their energies exclusively in the 
direction of mechanical skill, and he fearlessly accuses them of 
subserviency to European taste and style. 



i6 INTRODUCTION, 

In treating of the education of the scholar, he recognizes three 
great influences, — Nature, the Past with its accumulation ot 
books, and Action. 

Nature he regards as the most important influence. '' Know 
thyself " and '' Study nature " are to him as one maxim. The 
classifying instinct is one of the first to be developed ; we must 
learn to see that many things are governed by one law. 

In speaking of the influence of the past, he dwells chiefly on 
books. The danger, he tells us, is in placing too much faith in 
books. "Instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. 
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the 
worst." 

Action, though subordinate to the other influences, still is an 
essential factor in education. '' It is the raw material out of 
which the intellect molds her splendid product." He emphasizes 
the dignity and necessity of labor, and spurns the idea that the 
scholar must withdraw from the practical issues of life. Having 
spoken of the scholar's education, he eloquently describes his 
duties, which, he tells us, are all included in self-trust. If we 
would be true to ourselves, we must never yield to the popular 
cry, but manfully declare our independence, cost what it may, 
and hold to our belief though the whole world decry it. ) 

Lastly, he makes special application of these principles to the 
American Scholar. (' He rejoices in the fact that people are be- 
ginning to be interested in near and common things instead of in 
the " doings in Italy and Arabia." '' What would we really know 
the meaning of — the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, the 
ballad in the street." And he closes in that hopeful strain, so 
characteristic of Emerson, by expressing the utmost faith and 
confidence in the American Scholar. 



v/ / 

INTRODUCTION, i? 

P'^erhaps no other work of Emerson's has been less criticised 
li.>1iiore universally approved. James Russell Lowell, in speak- 
ing of its delivery, says : ''It was an event without any former 
parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in 
the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What 
crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with 
eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of 
foregone dissent!'* 

In this oration are to be found the germs of those thoughts 
and principles which animate all the author's later works, — ^elf- 
trust, self-culture, the dignity of labor, harmony and analogy in 
nature, intellectual and moral independence. ) Emerson has been 
accused of burying his thoughts so deep that common seekers 
cannot find them ; but in this essay, at least, few passages can 
be found which are not perfectly intelligible. Some of them, 
indeed, are so exquisitely expressed as to constitute veritable 
prose poems. The address, like all of Emerson's works, is full 
of quotations and allusions ; yet Emerson is essentially original. 
He is the champion of mental freedom, and continually urges 
others to free themselves from the fetters of conventionality. 

He practiced what he preached in this oration, and set the 
example of ignoring European methods and manners. The 
humblebee and the pine tree rather than the nightingale and the 
asphodel furnished his models. 

Let us rejoice that Emerson no longer need complain of our 
subserviency to European taste. Since this address was deliv- 
ered, we have had a host of original writers, — Cooper, Irving, 
Hawthorne, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whit- 
man, and many others. The whole tendency of American liter- 
ature has changed. As with one impulse it has grown more 



1 8 INTRODUCTION. 

original and more American. Emerson's rich and vigorous fr^ sh- 
ness has undoubtedly proved a stimulant to his contemporai^f s, 
and to him, more than to any other, we are indebted for ti.e 
development of American scholarship. 

It is hardly necessary to explain the theme of ^^ Self-Reliance." 
The title is self-explanatory. It is the doctrine which Emerson 
preaches in " The American Scholar," reiterated and elaborated. 
When we read there, '^ In self-trust all the virtues are compre- 
hended," we strike the keynote of this later essay. /To the self- 
reliant man everything is possible ; he may become a genius, a 
leader of men, but without this one virtue, his case is hopeless.] 
, Some of us, perhaps, cannot agree with Emerson when he tells 
us it is right to ignore many of the ordinary duties of life for the 
sake of maintaining our individuality ; but certain it is that con- 
formity to the conventionalities of society stamps out from 
many a man his originality and individuahty, and makes of him 
merely one of a mass of men. Let us see how it is in our own 
case. Suppose some one took enough interest in you or me to 
write our biography. Would it not read somewhat like this? 

'' Mr. was of such a nationality (Order). He belonged to 

such a reHgious sect (Class). He followed such a profession or 
engaged in such a business (Genus). He was a member of such 
a club, was interested in such a movement, etc. (Species)." These 
are all class distinctions, but where, we ask, is the attribute that 
shows his individuality, that makes him himself and distinguishes 
''him from his companions B and C and D? Of this, alas! most 
men's lives leave no record. 

In times of revolution, when conventionalities are forcibly 
thrust aside, our great men grow up like mushrooms in a night. 



' INTRODUCTION, 19 

ib' we find in our own history that at no other time did our 
pountry produce so many great men as during the Revolutionary 
period and the period of the Civil War. Must we, then, wish for 
war and turmoil, or shall we rather beheve with Emerson that if 
we would but be as brave as he would have us, the most peaceful 
times might fill our records with the achievements of men who 
now sink into unknown graves? 

In '' Compensation " we strike one of Emerson's deeper and 
more philosophic veins, — that great theory of retribution on 
earth which makes us pause and hold our breath. Is it indeed 
true that " every excess causes a defect, every defect an excess? " 
that ''for everything you have missed you have gained some- 
thing else, and for everything you gain you lose something? " 
that '' every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue 
rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty?" 
The universal acceptation of this doctrine would work a revolu- 
tion in society : for would not the wicked man fear to do wrong 
if he knew the punishment to be as inevitable as the laws of 
nature, and not dependent upon a possible detection and convic- 
tion by the judges of the world? And where would be the 
motive for his crime if he felt that he already possessed his 'full 
allotment of happiness, and that for everything he gained in one 
direction he would lose something in another? And would not 
the virtuous man be encouraged to persist all the more in his 
virtue if he knew that for every sacrifice he made there would 
be some reward, — a gain in character, if not a material com- 
pensation ? 

But the doctrine is one that is not easily learned. To be well 
understood it must be carefully taught by inspired men, by men 



20 INTRODUCTION, 

like Emerson himself : for all men have not his penetrating eye : 
they cannot see below the surface, and so long as the wrongdoci' 
succeeds in his wrongdoing and the wicked man is rich and sur- 
rounded by friends, so long will he be envied. No matter what 
his mental turmoil may be, no matter though the poorest beggar 
in the street have greater peace of mind, to the world at large he 
appears happy and successful, and men continue to look for ret- 
ribution in a life to come. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.^ 

Mr. President and Gentlemen, — 

I GREET you on the recommencement of our literary year. 
Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of 
labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the 
recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, hke the ancient 
Greeks; 2 for parhaments of love and poesy, like the Trouba- 5 
dours ;3 nor for the advancement of science, like our contempora- 
ries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday 
has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of 
letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. 
As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. 10 
Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will 
be, something else ; when the sluggard intellect of this continent 
will look from under its iron lids,^ and fill the postponed expecta- 
tion of the world with something better than the exertions of 

1 This oration was delivered in August, 1837, before the Cambridge chap- 
ter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a society composed of honor students 
graduated from the various colleges. 

2 Public games were a religious institution in ancient Greece. The most 
important were the Olympic games celebrated in honor of Zeus. At first 
they comprised simply feats of strength, races, etc. ; but later it became cus- 
tomary to indulge in intellectual exercises. Dramatic pieces and discourses 
were delivered, and artists exhibited their work while the games were in 
progress. 

3 Minstrels of Provence, in southern France, in the eleventh, twelfth, 
and thirteenth centuries. Their poetry was about love and gallantry or about 
war and chivalry. They sang at public festivals or at the courts of great 
barons or princes. They were also known as Provengal minstrels. 

* Heavy lids. 

21 



2 2 EMERSON. 

mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprentic y 
ship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. T) i 
millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed 
on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, 

5 that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, 

that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the 

constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers 

announce, shall one day be the polestar^ for a thousand years? 

In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the 

lo nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, — The 

American Scholar. Year by year, we come up hither to read 

one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new 

days and events have thrown on his character, and his hopes. 

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, 

IS convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, 
divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself ; 
just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its 
end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and subHme ; that 

20 there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, 
or through one faculty ; and that you must take the whole soci- 
ety to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, 
or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and 
statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social 

25 state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of 
whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other 
performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess 
himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace 
all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this 

30 fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has 
been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled 
into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one 
in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, 

1 The north star, or the star in the zenith of the north pole of the earth. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 23 

and Strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a 
neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. 
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is 
seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry, s 
He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks 
into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman 
scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden ^ by 
the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The 
priest becomes a form ; the attorney, a statute book ; the mechanic, 10 
a machine ; the sailor, a rope of a ship. 

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated 
intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking, In the degen- 
erate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a 
mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot 2 of other men*s thinking, is 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office 
is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her 
monitory pictures ; him the past instructs ; him the future invites. 
Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist 
for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar 20 
the only true master? But the old oracle said, ''All things have 
two handles: beware of the wrong one."^ In life, too often, 
the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us 
see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main 
influences he receives. 25 

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences 
upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun ; ^ and, after 

1 Tyrannized over. 2 Imitator. 

3 Theteachingsof Epictetus(6o?-i20?),a Roman Stoic philosopher, have 
been handed down by one of his pupils, and preserved in two treatises, Dis- 
courses of Epictetus, and Enchiridion. From the latter of these works the 
quotation is made. 

4 The predicate must be supplied, — a construction which occurs fre- 
quently in :his oration. 



24 EMERSON, 

sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ; ever the 
grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding 
and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle 
most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is 
5 nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an 
end, to the inexpHcable continuity of this web of God, but always 
circular 1 power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his 
own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — 
so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system 

lo on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without center, 
without circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, nature 
hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification 
begins. To the young mind, everything is individual, stands by 
itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in 

15 them one nature ; then three, then three thousand ; and so, tyran- 
nized over by its own unifying ^ instinct, it goes on tying things* 
together, diminishing anomahes, discovering roots running under 
ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower 
out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of 

2o history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying 
of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these 
objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law 
which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer dis- 
covers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is 

25 the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions 
and intelligible method throughout matter ; and science is nothing 
but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. 
The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact ; one 
after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to 

30 their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last 
fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight. 

Thus to him, to this schoolboy under the bending dome of 



1 Circular, because without beginning and without end. 

2 Uniting into one. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 25 

day,i IS suggested, that he and it proceed from one root ; one is 
leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. 
And what is that Root ? Is not that the soul of his soul ? — A 
thought too bold, — a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual 
light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, — when s 
he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural 
philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic 
hand, he shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as 
to a becoming creator.^ He shall see, that nature is the opposite 
of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one 10 
is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws 
are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the 
measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant 
of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in 
fine, the ancient precept, ''Know thyself,"^ and the modern 15 
precept, '' Study nature," become at last one maxim. 

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, 
the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, 
of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best 
type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the 20 
truth, — learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, — 
by considering their value alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age 
received into him the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave it 
the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It 25 
came into him, life ; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, 
short-lived actions ; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It 
came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead 
fact ; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It 
now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in propor- 30 

1 " Dome of day," i.e., the sky. 

2 *' Knowledge as to," ,etc., i.e., knowledge will become a creator for him. 

3 A maxim of Chilo, one of the seven sages of Greece, who lived in the 
sixth century B.C. • 



26 EMERSON. 

tion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it 
soar, so long does it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, 
of transmuting hfe into truth. In proportion to the complete- 

5 ness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness 
of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air 
pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither 
can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the 
perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, 

lo that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, 
as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, 
it is found, must write its own books ; or rather, each genera- 
tion for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will 
not fit this. 

IS Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which at- 
taches to the act of creation, — the act of thought, — is transferred 
to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man : 
henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and 
wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as 

20 love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, 
the book becomes noxious : the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish 
and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incur- 
sions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received 
this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. 

25 Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not 
by Man Thinking ; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, 
who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of 
principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it 
their duty to accept the views, which Cicero,^ which Locke,^ 

1 Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Roman author, orator, and states- 
man. He stands preeminent as a specimen of the highest moral and intel- 
lectual culture of the ancient world. 

2 John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher and theologian. His aim 
was to inquire into the original certainty and extent of hilman knowledge. 
His most famous work is his Essay on the Human Understanding. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 27 

which Bacon,! have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and 
Bacon were only young men in libraries, ^ when they wrote these 
books. 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. 
Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such ; not as s 
related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a 
sort of Third Estate^ with the world and the soul. Hence, the 
restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibhomaniacs • of all 
degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well used ; abused, among the 10 
worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all 
means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I 
had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction 
clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a sys- 
tem. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. 15 
This every man is entitled to ; this every man contains within 
him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. 
The soul active sees absolute truth ; and utters truth, or creates. 
In this action, it is genius ; not the privilege of here and there a 
favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is 20 
progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the insti- 
tution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. 
This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me 
down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks 
forward : the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hind- 25 
head : ^ man hopes : genius creates. Whatever talents may be, 
if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his ; — 

1 Francis Bacon (i 561-1626), English philosopher and statesman. He 
tried to recall philosophy from speculation and use it as an interpreter of 
nature. His most important work is the Novum Organum (New Method). 

2 *' Young men in libraries," i.e., young men like them.selves. 

^ In some countries the population has been divided into three classes or 
estites, with respect to political rights and powers, as nobility, clergy, and 
people; lords temporal, lords spiritual, and commons, etc. The common 
people represent the *' third estate." 

■^ The back part of the head. 



28 EMERSON, 

cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are 
creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words ; 
manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or 
authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense 
5 of good and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive 
from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of hght, 
without periods of soKtude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a 
fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy 

loof genius by overinfluence. The hterature of every nation bears 
me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized ^ 
now for two hundred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly 
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instru- 

isments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can 
read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other 
men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of 
darkness come, as come they must, — when the sun is hid, and 
the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair to the lamps which 

20 were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, 

where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian 

proverb says, ''A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful." 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from 

the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one 

25 nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of 
the great Enghsh poets, of Chaucer,^ of Marvell,^ of Dryden,^ 

1 Imitated Shakespeare. This is one of the many words which Emerson 
has coined. 

2 Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 ?-i40o), the ** Father of English Poetry," author 
of the famous Canterbury Tales. 

3 Andrew Marvell (1621-78), English poet, called the '* Bi;itish Aris tides " 
on account of his great probity, the allusion being to the Athenian, statcbu. an 
Aristides, surnamed ** the Just." The Emigrants in the Bermudas is Mar- 
veil's greatest poem. 

^ John Dryden (1631-1700), English poet. He was apppinted poet liu-y 
reate in 1668. One of his most popular poems is The Ode for St. Cecilia's Day. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 29 

with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which is 
in great part caused by the abstraction of all ti?ne from their 
verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, 
when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hun- 
dred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that s 
which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence 
thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all 
minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some 
foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores 
for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay 10 
up food before death for the young grub they shall never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exag- 
geration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, 
as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were 
boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be 15 
fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, 
who had almost no other information than by the printed page. 
I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. 
One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, 
'^ He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry 20 
out the wealth of the Indies." ^ There is then creative reading 
as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor 
and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes 
luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly 
significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. 25 
We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision 
is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, 
perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will 
read, in his Plato 2 or Shakespeare,^ only that least part, — only 

1 Spanish proverb. 

2 Plato (427-347 B.C.), Athenian author and philosopher, the father of 
idealism. He was a disciple of Socrates, whose memory and teachings he 
preserved in his Dialogues. 

^ William Shakespeare (i 564-1616), the greatest of English poets and 
dramatists. His most popular plays are Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, 



30 ^ EMERSON. 

the authentic utterances of the oracle ; — all the rest he rejects, 
were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare^s. 

Gf^i^Eirse, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to 
a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by labo- 
5 rious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable 
office, — to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, 
when they aim not to drill, but to create ; when they gather from 
far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by 
the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. 

lo Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pre- 
tension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though 
of towns of gold, can never countervail i the least sentence or 
syllable of wit.^ Forget this, and our American colleges will 
recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every 

15 year. 

III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should 
be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or 
pubHc labor, as a penknife for an ax. The so-called '^ practical 
men " sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or 

20 see^ they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, 
— who are always, more universally than any other class, the 
scholars of their day, — are addressed as women ; that the rough, 
spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a 
mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfran- 

25 chised ; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As 
far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. 
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. With- 
out it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen 
into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of 

30 beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, 
but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The pre- 
amble ^ of thought, the transition through which it passes from 

1 Prevail against. 2 Sound sense. ^ Prelude, or preliminary. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 31 

the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I 
know, as I have Uved. Instantly we know whose words are 
loaded with life, and whose not. 

The world, — this shadow of the soul, or other me^ lies wide 
around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts s 
and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this 
resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and 
take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an 
instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I 
pierce its order ; I dissipate its fear ; I dispose of it within the 10 
circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know 
by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and 
planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I 
do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves 
and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is is 
pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasper- 
ation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true 
scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss 
of power. 

It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her 20 
splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experi- 
ence is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted 
into satin. 1 The manufacture goes forward at all hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now 
matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the 25 
air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which 
we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. 
Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or 
know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our 
body. The new deed is yet a part of life, — remains for a time 30 
immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, 
it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a 
thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured ; the 

1 The silkworm feeds on the mulberry leaf, which furnishes the material 
from which it spins the silk that is manufactured into satin. 

/ 



32 EMERSON. 

corruptible has put on incorruption.^ Henceforth it is an object 
of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, 
too, the impossibihty of antedating this act. In its grub state, it 
cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, with- 

s out observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is 
an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private 
history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose, its adhesive, inert 
form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empy- 
rean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of 

lo boys, and dogs, and ferules,^ the love of little maids and berries, 
and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone 
already ; friend and relative, profession and party, town and 
country, nation and world, must also soar and sing. 

Of course, he w^ho has put forth his total strength in fit actions, 

IS has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out 
of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flowerpot, 
there to hunger and pine ; nor trust the revenue of some single 
faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoy- 
ards,^ who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shep- 

20 herdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one 
day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had 
whittled up the last of their pine trees. Authors we have, in 
numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by 
a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow 

25 the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish 
their merchantable stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous 
of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in coun- 
try labors ; in town, ^ in the insight into trades and manufactures ; 

1 I Cor. XV. 54. 

2 Corporal punishment at school administered with the ferule. 

3 Inhabitants of Savoy, south of Lake Geneva, the loftiest mountain re- 
gion of Europe. Wood-carving was one of their chief industries, for which 
the forests of beech, birch, and pine, which have suffered deplorable clear- 
ances, furnished ample material. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 33 

in frank intercourse with many men and women ; in science ; in 
art ; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by 
which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn imme- 
diately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through 
the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life hes behind us s 
as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones^ for the 
masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges 
and books only copy the language which the field and the work- 
yard made. 

But the final value of action, hke that of books, and better than lo 
books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of Undula- 
tion^ in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of 
the breath ; in desire and satiety ; in the ebb and flow of the 
sea ; in day and night ; in heat and cold ; and as yet more 
deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us is 
under the name of Polarity,^ — these ''fits of easy transmission 
and reflection,'' as Newton^ called them, are the law of nature 
because they are the law of spirit. 

The mind now thinks ; now acts ; and each fit reproduces the 
other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the 20 
fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer appre- 
hended, and books are a weariness, — he has always the resource 
to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the 
function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its 
source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to 25 
think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? 
He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. 
This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur 
of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer 

1 Headstones of a wall. 2 Wave motion. 

3 That quality or condition of a body by virtue of which it exhibits oppo- 
site or contrasted powers or properties in opposite directions. 

* Sir Isaac Newton (i 642-1 727), English philosopher and mathematician. 
He discovered the law of gravitation and is regarded as the greatest of natural 
philosophers. His most important work was the Principia. 



34 EMERSON. 

his lowly roof. Those " far from fame/' who dwell and act with 
him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and pas- 
sages of the day better than it can be measured by any public 
and designed display. Time shall teach him, that the scholar 

5 loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the 
sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is 
lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on 
whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes 
the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out 

loof unhandseled^ savage nature, out of terrible Druids^ and 
Berserkirs^ come at last Alfred^ and Shakespeare. 

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of 
the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is 
virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for 

15 unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome ; always 
we are invited to work ; only be this Hmitation observed, that a 
man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion 
to the popular judgments and modes of action. 

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by 
2o books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties. 

1 A handsel is a gift ; hence, ungifted or uncultured. 

2 An order of priests among the ancient Celts of Gaul, Britain, and Ire- 
land. They believed in one Supreme Being and in the transmigration of the 
soul from one body to another. They were held in great awe, as disobedience 
to their mandates was followed by excommunication, in those days a terrible 
fate. They guarded the secret archives of the religion and acted as instruc- 
tors and judges. Though they were well educated and understood many of 
the sciences, they also practiced divination and magic, and sacrificed human 
beings as part of their worship. The Druids reverenced the oak and the 
mistletoe, and their most profound ceremonies were performed in the depths 
of oak forests or in caves. 

3 Berserkir, or Berserker, was a hero in Scandinavian mythology who 
fought without armor, but overcame all opponents by his valor ; hence the 
name Berserkirs was given to a class of warriors who fought naked under the 
influence of frenzy. 

* Alfred the Great (849-901), King of the West Saxons, a distinguished 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 35 

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be 
comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to 
raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appear- 
ances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of obser- 
vation. Flamsteed ^ and Herschel,^ in their glazed observatories, s 
may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results 
being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private 
observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the 
human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — 
watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts ; correcting lo 
still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate 
fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray 
often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the 
disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must 
stammer in his speech ; often forego the living for the dead, is 
Worse yet, he must accept, — how often! poverty and solitude. 
For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting 
the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the 
cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the 
faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are 20 
the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and 
self-directed ; and the state of virtual hostihty in which he seems 

scholar and patron of learning. He is characterized by historians as the 
wisest, best, and greatest king that ever reigned in England. 

1 John Flamsteed (i 646-1 719), first English astronomer royal under 
Charles II. He was the first to explain the true principles of the equation 
of time. His Historia Coelistis Britannicse, in which he determined the 
position of nearly 3000 stars, was the first trustworthy catalogue of the stars. 

2 Sir William Herschel (i 738-1822) was of German birth, but all his 
astronomical work was done in England. He accomplished more than any 
other man in the field of astronomy. He discovered the planet Uranus, and 
made many remarkable observations upon the physical constitution of the 
sun, and upon comets ; but his most valuable service to the cause of astron- 
omy consisted in his accurate observations upon variable and binary stars. 
He demonstrated the action upon the most distant members of the firmament 
of the same '^chanical laws that bind together our solar system. 



36 EMERSON, 

to Stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all 
this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in 
exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, 
who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and 
s lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. 
He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity 
that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and commu- 
nicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, 
and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human 

to heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its 
commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive 
and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her 
inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to- 
day, — this he shall hear and promulgate. 

IS These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence 
in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he 
only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest 
appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish ^ of a govern- 
ment, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half 

20 mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on 
this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole ques- 
tion is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost 
in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that 
a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the 

25 earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadi- 
ness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself ; add obser- 
vation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach ; and 
bide his own time, — happy enough, if he can satisfy himself 
alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads 2 

30 on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him 
to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going 
down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the 
secrets of all minds. He learns, that he who has mastered any 

1 An idol or object of blind devotion. 

2 Follows. 



• THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 37 

law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men 
whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his 
own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering 
his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have 
recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them s 
also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confes- 
sions, — his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, — until 
he finds that he is the complement of his hearers ; — that they 
drink his words because he fulfills for them their own nature ; 
the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to lo 
his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and 
universally true. The people dehght in it ; the better part of 
every man feels, This is my music ; this is myseli 

In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended, free should 
the scholar be, ^ free and brave. Free even to the definition of is 
freedom, '' without any hindrance that does not arise out of his 
own constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar 
by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from 
ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dan- 
gerous times, arise from the presumption, that, hke children and 20 
women, his is a protected class ; or if he seek a temporary peace 
by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, 
hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes,^ peeping 
into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep 
his courage up. So is the danger a danger still ; so is the fear 25 
worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its 
eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, — see the whelping 
of this lion, — which lies no great way back; he will then find 
in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent ; he 
will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can hence- 30 
forth defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see 
through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, 
what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance, — 

1 The ostrich, when hunted, thrusts its head into a bush and imagines 
itself invisible because it cannot see the hunter. 



38 EMERSON. 

by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already 
dealt it its mortal blow. 

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It is a mischievous 
notion that we are come late into nature ; that the world was 
5 finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in 
the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we 
bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint.^ They adapt them- 
selves to it as they may ; but in proportion as a man has any- 
thing in him divine, the firmament fl^ows before him and takes his 

lo signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he 
who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the 
world who give the color of their present thought to all nature 
and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their 
carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple 

15 which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and invit- 
ing nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great 
thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.^ 
Linnaeus^ makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins 
it from the farmer and the herb-woman ; Davy,^ chemistry ; and 

1 ** It is flint," i.e., hard or unimpressionable as flint. 

2 In Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's squire, relates 
a story of a gentleman who, having invited a poor farmer to dine with him, 
pressed him to take the head of the table. The countryman, piquing himself 
on his good breeding, refused to take the place of honor, until his host, los- 
ing all patience, exclaimed, *' Sit thee down, clodpole, for let me sit wherever 
I will, that will still be the upper end and the place of worship to thee." 
The same thought, modified in expression, is placed by diff"erent authors in 
the mouths of various men, and it is uncertain to which of several famous 
Scotchmen Emerson ascribes it. 

3 Carolus Linnaeus, or Carl von Linne (1707-78), Swedish botanist. He 
established natural science upon its modern basis, and was, in botany and 
zoology, the foremost man of his time. His artificial system of plant classi- 
fication, though now discarded, was simple and easily followed, and has 
greatly facilitated the study of botany. 

4 Sir Humphry Davy ( 1 778-1829), English chemist. His greatest 
achievement was his account of the decomposition by galvanism of the fixed 
alkalies, by which he proved that these alkalies are metallic oxides. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 39 

Cuvier,! fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with 
serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd 
to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of 
the Atlantic follow the moon.2 

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, s 
— darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me 
the feehng of my audience in stating my own behef. But I have 
already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doc- 
trine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged ; he 
has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light, that can lead lo 
him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. 
Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, 
and are called ''the mass " and ''the herd." In a century, in a 
millennium, one or two men ; that is to say, — one or two approxi- 
mations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in is 
the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, — ripened ; 
yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full 
stature. What a testimony, — full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne 
to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor 
partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and 20 
the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for 
their acquiescence in a pohtical and social inferiority. They are 
content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, 
so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature 
which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. 25 
They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be 
their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their 
downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish 
to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those 

1 George Cuvier (1769--1832), French naturalist. He first applied to 
zoology the natural method, and founded a system of classification of animals 
based on their anatomical structure. He is regarded as the founder of the 
science of comparative anatomy. 

2 The attraction of the moon heaps up the waters of the sea into a broad, 
low wave, the passage of which forms the ebb and flow of the tide. 



40 EMERSON. 

giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives* for us, and we live 
in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power ; 
and power because it is as good as money, — the ''spoils," so 

5 called, '' of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, 
and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake 
them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to the true, and 
leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to 
be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. 

lo The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the 
upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown^ along the 
ground. The private Hfe of one man shall be a more illustrious 
monarchy, — more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene 
in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For 

IS a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of 
all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only 
done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for my- 
self. The books which once we valued more than the apple 
of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying, 

2c that we have come up with the point of view which the uni- 
versal mind took through the eyes of one scribe ; we have 
been that man, and have passed on. First, one ; then another ; 
we drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, 
we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has 

25 never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be 
enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier on any one side to 
this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, 
which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna,^ lightens the capes 
of Sicily ; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius,^ illuminates 

30 the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which 

1 Strewn. 

2 A celebrated volcanic mountain of Sicily, the largest island in the Medi- 
terranean Sea. 

3 A famous volcano, the most active in Europe, situated near Naples, the 
largest town in Italy. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 41 

beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates 
all men. 

1/ 

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of 
the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to 
say, of nearer reference to the time and to this country. s 

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas 
which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data 
for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now 
of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I have 
intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all 10 
individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, 
I believe each individual passes through all three. The boy is a 
Greek ; the youth, romantic ; the adult, reflective. I deny not, 
however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly 
enough traced. is 

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion.^ Must that 
needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed 
with second thoughts ; we cannot enjoy anything for hankering 
to know whereof the pleasure consists ; we are lined with eyes ; 
we see with our feet ; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhap- 20 
piness, — 

^' Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." ^ 

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would 
we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, 
and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary 25 
class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find them- 
selves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the 
coming state as untried ; as a boy dreads the water before he 
has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would 
desire to be born in, — is it not the age of Revolution ; when the 30 
old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared ; 

1 Literally, turning inward ; hence, reflection. 

2 Shakespeare's Hamlet, act iii, sc. I. 



42 EMERSON. 

when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope ; 
when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the 
rich possibilities of the new era ? This time, like all times, is a 
very good one, if we but know what to do with it. 

5 I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming 
days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through 
philosophy and science, through church and state. 

One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which 
effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the 

lo state, assumed in Hterature a very marked and as benign an 
aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful ; the near, the low, 
the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had been 
negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing 
and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, 

IS is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The Hter- 
ature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the 
street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. 
It is a great stride. It is a sign, — is it not? of new vigor, when 
the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run 

20 into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, 
the romantic ; what is doing in Italy or Arabia ; what is Greek 
art, or Proven9al minstrelsy ; I embrace the common, I explore 
and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight 
into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. 

25 What would we really know the meaning of ? The meal in the 
firkin ; the milk in the pan ; the ballad in the street ; the news 
of the boat ; the glance of the eye ; the form and the gait of the 
body ; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters ; show 
me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as 

30 always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature ; 
let me see every trifle bristhng with the polarity that ranges it 
instantly on an eternal law ; and the shop, the plow, and the 
leger, ^ referred to the hke cause by which light undulates and 
poets sing ; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and 

1 Old form of *' ledger." 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 43 

lumber room, but has form and order ; there is no trifle ; there is 
no puzzle ; but one design unites and animates the farthest pin- 
nacle and the lowest trench. 

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith/ Burns,^ Cow- 
per,3 and, in a newer time, of Goethe,^ Wordsworth,^ and Car- s 
lyle.^ This idea they have differently followed and with various 
success. In . contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,"^ of 
Johnson,^ of Gibbon,^ looks cold and pedantic. This writing is 
blood- warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not 
less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near ex- lo 
plains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to 
all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful 

1 Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74), Irish poet, historian, and novelist. The 
charm of his poetry lies in the fact that he enlists simple and universal feel- 
ings in behalf of the moral principle he seeks to establish. His best known 
poem is The Deserted Village, and his famous and only novel. The Vicar of 
Wakefield. 

2 Robert Burns (1759-96), Scottish poet, the poet of the people and of 
homely human nature, Tam O'Shanter, and The Cotter's Saturday Night 
are his most noted poems. 

3 William Cowper (i 731-1800), English poet of simple human affections. 
He is best known by The Task, and Table Talk. 

4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (i 749-1832), Germany's greatest philo- 
sophical poet. His masterpieces are Faust, and Wilhelm Meister. 

5 William Wordsworth (i 770-1850), English poet of nature and of man. 
His longest poems are The Prelude, and The Excursion. 

^ Thomas Carlyle (i 795-1881), British essayist and historian, noted for 
his deep insight into the nature of things. His most famous works are 
History of the French Revolution, and Sartor Resartus. 

"7 Alexander Pope (1688-1744), English poet. Pope was a critical poet 
of no great originality. He cast other men's thoughts into finished verse. 
His most noted works are the Essay on Man, and the Dunciad. 

8 Samuel Johnson (1709-84), English miscellaneous writer, author of the 
didactic novel Rasselas and of the Dictionary of the English Language. He 
was a man of wonderful conversational powers, and his language is con- 
densed and well-balanced like Pope's. 

^ Edward Gibbon (1737-94), English historian. His language is elab- 
orate but he displays little sympathy with humanity. His great work is The 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 



44 EMERSON. 

in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of 
the modems, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the 
ancients. 

There is one man of genius, who has done much for this 
5 philosophy of hfe, whose literary value has never yet been rightly 
estimated ; — I mean Emanuel Swedenborg.^ The most imagi- 
native of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, 
he endeavored to ingraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the 
popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt, of course, 

lo must have difficulty, which no genius could surmount. But he 
saw and showed the connection between nature and the affec- 
tions of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual char- 
acter of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his 
shade-loving muse^ hover over and interpret the lower parts of 

IS nature ; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to 
the foul material forms, and has given in epical parables^ a the- 
ory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous polit- 
ical movement, is the new importance given to the single person. 

20 Everything that tends to insulate the individual, — to surround 
him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel 
the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign 
state with a sovereign state ; — tends to true union as well as 
greatness. '^ I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi,^ '^ that 

25 no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any 

1 Emanuel Swedenborg (i 688-1 772), founder of the New Jerusalem 
Church. He first applied himself to the problem of discovering the nature 
of the soul and spirit by anatomicsil studies, but a change came over him 
which made of the scientific inquirer a supernatural prophet. 

2 An inspiring power. 

3 An epic is a poem about heroic or great events ; a parable is a moral 
fable or an allegory ; hence, allegorical relations of great events or things. 

^ Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Swiss educational reformer, 
and author of Leonard and Gertrude. He was deeply in earnest in his work 
and spent his life with his pupils, sharing in their sufferings as well as in 
their play. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 45 

Other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The 
scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability 
of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the 
future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be 
one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, s 
The world is nothing, the man is all ; in yourself is the law of all 
nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends ; in 
yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know 
all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, 
this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all lo 
motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American 
Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of 
Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected 
to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make 
the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indo- is 
lent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The 
mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon 
itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the com- 
plaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon 
our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all 2c 
the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, — 
but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles 
on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die 
of disgust, — some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They 
did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now 25 
crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the 
single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there 
abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, — pa- 
tience ; — with the shades ^ of all the good and great for company ; 
and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life ; and for 30 
work, the study and the communication of principles, the making 
those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not 

1 Spirits or spiritual influence ; so called because it was formerly believed 
that the soul, after its separation from the body, was perceptible to the sight, 
but not to the touch, in which respect it resembled a shadow or shade. 



46 EMERSON. 

the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit ; — not to be 
reckoned one character ; — not to yield that peculiar fruit which 
each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, 
in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to 

s which we belong ; and our opinion predicted geographically, as 
the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, — please 
God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet ; we 
will work with our own hands ; we will speak our own minds. 
The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, 

lo and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of 
man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. 
A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes 
himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 

"iVi? U qucesiveris extras ' 



/ 



'* Man is his own star ; and the soul that can \^ 

Render an honest and a perfect man, 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate; 
Nothing to him falls early or too late. 
Our acts our angels are, or ^ good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still," 

Ep, to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Mart's Fortune, 

1 '* Do not seek for anything outside of thyself." 

2 Whether. 



47 



Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she- wolfs teat; 
Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
Power and speed be hands and feet. 



48 



SELF-RELIANCE. 

I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent 
painter which were original and not conventional. The soul 
always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what 
it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any 
thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to s 
beheve that what is true for you in your private heart is true for 
all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it 
shall be the universal sense ;i for the inmost in due time becomes 
the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the 
trumpets of the Last Judgment. FamiHar as the voice of the lo 
mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,^ 
and Milton^ is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and 
spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should 
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes 
across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firma- is 
ment^ of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his 
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize 
our own rejected thoughts : they come back to us with a certain 
alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting 
lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spon- 20 
taneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most^ 
when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-mor- 

1 Opinion. 2 See Note 2, p. 29. 

3 John Milton (1608-74), one of the greatest and most original of English 
poets, author of Paradise Lost. 

* The heavens or canopy in which the stars appear to be placed ; hence, 
' to carry out the metaphor, the firmament, rather than the world, of bards 
j and sages. 5 '< Then most," i.e., most at that time. 

4 49 



50 EMERSON. 

row a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what 
we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to 
take with shame our own opinion from another. 

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at 
5 the conviction that envy is ignorance ; that imitation is suicide ; 
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion ; 
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nour- 
ishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on 
that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power 

10 which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows 
what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has 
tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes 
much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture ^ in 
the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye 

IS was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that 
particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed 
of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be 
safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so 2 it be faith- 
fully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest 

20 by cowards. A man is reHeved and gay when he has put his 
heart into his work and done his best ; but what he has said or 
done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance 
which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him ; 
no muse befriends ; no invention, no hope. 

25 ^ Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron string. Ac- 
cept the place the divine providence has found for you, the so- 
ciety of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great 
men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to 
the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the abso- 

30 lutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through 
their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now 
men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent 

1 Image. 

2 *' Proportionate," etc., i.e., of correct proportions and gf good results, f 
so long as. 



SELF-RELIANCE, 51 

destiny ; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not 
cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and 
benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on 
Chaos ^ and the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face s 
and behavior of children, babes, and even' brutes ! That divided 
and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arith- 
metic has computed the strength and means opposed to our pur- 
pose, these 2 have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as 
yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are dis- 10 
concerted. Infancy conforms to nobody : all conform to it, so 
that one babe commonly makes four or five ^ out of the adults 
who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puber- 
ty^ and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and 
made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by^ is 
if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, 
because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next 
room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he 
knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, 
then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. 20 

The nonchalance 5 of boys who are sure of a dinner, and 
would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate 
one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the 
parlor what the pit is in the playhouse ; ^ independent, irresponsi- 
ble, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass 25 
by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, 

1 The confused or formless elementary state in which the universe is 
supposed to have existed before order was developed ; hence, disorder in 
general. 

2 Children, babes, and brutes. 3 Supply '' babes." 
4 The age of maturity. 5 Indifference. 

6 In the early theaters the floor of the house, below the level of the stage, 
was known as the pit. The seats in this part were the cheapest in the house, 
and the people who assembled there were of a class who did not care much 
what others thought of them, but shouted and stamped their applause and 
hissed their disapproval, as the occasion seemed to demand. 



52 EMERSON. 

summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, 
troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, 
about interests ; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You 
must court him : he does not court you. But the man is, as it 

s were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has 
once acted or spoken with eclat^ he is a committed person, 
watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose 
affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe ^ 
for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who^ 

lo can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again 
from the s^me unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted inno- 
cence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all 
passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, 
would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear. 

IS These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow 
faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society every- 
where is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its 
members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the mem- 
bers agree, for the better securing of his bread to each share- 

20 holder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The 
virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. 
It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. 

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.^ He who 
would gather immortal palms ^ must not be hindered by the name 

25 of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.^ Nothing is at 

1 A French word (pronounced a kla') meaning brilliancy of success which 
attracts applause. 

2 Oblivion ; from the ancient Greek myth of Lethe, the personification of 
oblivion, or from the river Lethe, in the lower world, of which the souls of 
the departed drank and forgot all they had done in the upper world. 

3 He who. 

^ One who does not conform to established opinions or creeds. 

^ Undying fame. A branch or leaf of the palm was anciently worn as a 
symbol of victory or rejoicing. 1 

6 '' Explore," etc., i.e., himself investigate if the thing so called be really 1 
goodness. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 53 

last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you 
to yourself,^ and you shall have the suffrage ^ of the world. I 
remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted 
to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me 
with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, 5 
What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I Kve 
wholly from within? my friend suggested, — ''But these impulses 
may be from below, not from above." I rephed, ''They do not 
seem to me to be such ; but if I am the Devil's child, I will Hve 
then from the Devil.'' No law can be sacred to me but that of 10 
my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transfer- 
able to that or this ; the only right is what is after my constitu- 
tion, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry him- 
self in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular 
and ephemeral^ but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we is 
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead insti- 
tutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and 
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital,^ 
and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear 
the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?^ If an angry bigot 20 
assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with 
his last news from Barbadoes,^ why should I not say to him, 
" Go love thy infant ; love thy wood-chopper : be good-natured 
and modest : have that grace ; and never varnish your hard, un- 
charitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk 25 
a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home." Rough 
and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer 
than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some 

1 ''Absolve," etc., i.e., justify yourself. 2 Approval. 

3 "Titular and ephemeral," i.e., existing in name only and of short 
duration. 4 <' i ought," etc., i.e., I ought to act as if I were alive. 

5 Be tolerated. 

6 An island in the Atlantic Ocean, belonging to Great Britain, one of the 
Lesser Antilles. The inhabitants are mainly negroek who, prior to 1834, 
were slaves. 



54 EMERSON. 

edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be 
preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that 
pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and 
brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels 
5 of the doorpost, Whini}- I hope it is somewhat better than 
whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Ex- 
pect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude com- 
pany. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of 
my obhgation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they 

lo my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge 
the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not be- 
long to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of 
persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold ; 
for them I will go to prison, if need be ; but your miscellaneous 

IS popular charities ; the education at college of fools ; the build- 
ing of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand ; 
alms to sots ; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies ; — though I 
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and g\N^ the dollar, it 
is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood 

20 to withhold. 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than 
the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is 
called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much 
as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily nonappearance on 

25 parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of 
their living. in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high 
board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, 
but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much 
prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and 

30 equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it 
to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding.^ I 

1 Emerson means to convey the idea that he would rather have his actions 
ascribed to mere caprice than to be compelled to spend his time in explaining 
them. 

2 A use of the sign for the thing signified. '' Not to need diet and bleed- 



SELF^RELIA NCE. 5 5 

ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal 
from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes 
no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are 
reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege 
where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may s 
be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or 
the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. 

What I must do is all that concerns rne, not what the people 
think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual 
life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and 10 
meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those 
who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. 
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion ; it is easy 
in solitude to live after our own ; but the great man is he who 
in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the inde- 15 
pendence of solitude. 

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead 
to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs 
the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead 
church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great 20 
party either for the government or against it, spread your table 
like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty 
to detect the precise man^ you are. And, of course, so much force 
is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I 
shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reenforce yourself. 25 
A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of 
conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I 
hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency 
of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know before- 
hand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? 30 
Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the 

ing " means not to be unhealthy, a special course of diet being frequently 
prescribed in cases of illness, and bleeding having been one of the first 
resources of the old medical practitioners. 

1 ** The precise man," i.e., precisely what kind of a man. 



$6 EMERSON. 

grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not 
know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — 
the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He 
is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench i are the emp- 

s tiest affectation. Well,! most men have bound their eyes with 
one or another handkerchief,^ and attached themselves to some 
one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes 
them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false 
in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their 

10 two is not the real two, their four not the real four ; so that 
every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin 
to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in 
the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come 
to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the 

15 gentlest asinine^ expression. There is a mortifying experience 
in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the gen- 
eral history; I mean ''the foolish face of praise,'' the forced 
smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease 
in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The mus- 

20 cles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping 
willfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the 
most disagreeable sensation. 

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. 
And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. 

25 The bystanders look askance on him in the pubHc street or in 
the friend's parlor. If this aversation^ had its origin in con- 
tempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a 
sad countenance ; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their 
sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the 

30 wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of 
the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the 

1 Court of justice. 

2 An extension of the metaphor of the blindman's-bufif. 

3 Like an ass, or stupid. 

4 A turning away from. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 57 

college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world 
to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is deco- 
rous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable 
themselves. But when to their feminine^ rage the indignation 
of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are s 
aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bot- 
tom of society is made to growl and mow,^ it needs the habit 
of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no 
concernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consist- i 
ency ; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of 
others have no other data for computing our orbit ^ than our past 
acts, and we are loth to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? 
Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict i 
somewhat^ you have stated in this or that public place? Sup- 
pose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to 
be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely 
even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment 
into the thousand-eyed^ present, and live ever in a new day. In 21 
your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity ; yet 
when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart 
and hfe, though they should clothe God with shape and color. 
Leave your theory, as Joseph^ his coat in the hand of the harlot, 
and flee. 2 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of httle minds, adored 
by Httle statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consist- 
ency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well 
concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you 
think now in hard^ words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow 3< 

1 Feminine, because decorous and timid. 2 Xo make grimaces. 

3 Course or path in life. 4 Something. 

5 Thousand-eyed, because there may be thousands of witnesses to things 
that happen in the present, while for the past we must rely on memory and 
history. 6 Qen. xxxix. 12. '^ Strong and enduring. 



58 EMERSON. 

thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you 
said to-day. — ''Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood." — 
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was mis- 
understood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Coper- 

5 nicus, and Galileo, and Newton,^ and every pure and wise spirit 
that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies ^ of 
his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities 
of Andes and Himmaleh^ are insignificant in the curve of the 

lo sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A 
character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza ; — read it for- 
ward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.^ In this 
pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record 

1 Pythagoras (582-507 B.C.), a famous Greek philosopher, and leader in 
a movement for ethical and religious reform. He died in banishment. 
Socrates (469-399 B.C.), one of the most famous of Athenian philosophers 
and teachers of truth, virtue, and self-control, was ridiculed, imprisoned, and 
died a martyr; Jesus was crucified; Martin Luther (i 483-1 546), a German 
Augustine monk, protested against certain abuses that had grown up within 
the Catholic Church, and became the leader of the Reformation or religious 
revolution. He was excommunicated by the church and outlawed by the 
state. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish astronomer, was the 
originator of the theory that the planets revolve around the sun. This theory 
was opposed to the prejudices and dogmas of the time and was not generally 
accepted until many years after his death. Galileo, or Galilei (i 564-1 642), 
was a famous Italian astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and inventor of 
the refracting telescope by means of which he discovered the mountainous 
character of the moon, the phases of the planet Venus, the satellites of Jupi- 
ter, and the rings of Saturn. His physical discoveries were heard with in- 
credulity by the physicists of his time, and he was subjected to persecution 
and imprisonment by the Inquisition because of them. Sir Isaac Newton 
(1642-172 7), the great English philosopher and mathematician who discov- 
ered the law of gravitation. His teachings were hotly contested and only 
adopted after many years. 2 Digressions. 

3 Andes and Himmaleh (Himalaya), the great mountain ranges of South 
America and Asia respectively. 

4 It is the palindrome, not the acrostic or Alexandrian stanza, which has 
this peculiarity. 



SELF-RELIANCE, 

day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospec 
I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it . 
and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with thv 
hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave 
that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.^ We pass s 
for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine 
that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, 
and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so 
they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, lo 
the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These 
varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of 
thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the 
best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. ^ See the line from 
a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tend- is 
ency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain 
your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. 
Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify 
you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm 
enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done 20 
so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, 
do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. 
The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of 
virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of 
the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagina- 25 
tion ? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories 
behind. They shed an united hght on the advancing actor. 
He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which 
throws thunder into Chatham's^ voice, and dignity into Wash- 

1 '^ Without prospect," etc., i.e., without looking backward or forward. 

2 Emerson means to express by this whole passage that our lives should 
be natural, not artificial or conventional. 

3 The short, oblique courses back and forth by which a sailing vessel ad- 
vances against a li/eadwind. 

* ^William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-78), one of the most distinguished 

: / 



EMERSON. 

6 port, and America into Adams's ^ eye. Honor is vener- 

. to us because it is no ephemeris.^ It is always ancient 

irtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We 

love it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love 

5 and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of 
an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and 
consistency. Let the words be gazetted^ and ridiculous hence- 
forward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle 

lo from the Spartan fife.^ Let us never bow and apologize more. 
A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to 
please him ; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will 
stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I 
would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth 

IS mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the 
face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot 
of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor 
working wherever a man works ; that a true man belongs -to no 
other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, 

20 there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. 
Ordinarily, everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, or 
of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing 
else ; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so 
much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every 

of English statesmen. He was possessed of great eloquence and all his 
actions were impelled by deep patriotic feeling. 

1 Samuel Adams (i 722-1 803), American statesman. Adams was a con- 
spicuous agitator of the popular cause in America, a prominent member of 
the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, and one of the signers of the 
Declaration of Independence. He is called the *' Father of the Revolution." 

2 A journal or account of daily transactions. 

3 Officially announced. 

4 The Spartans of ancient Greece were especially noted for their courage 
and valor. The signal of attack in battle was given by the music of the fife 
or flute. Hence, '* instead of the gong," etc., instead of a mere summons to 
dinner let us have something that will inspire us to bravery. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 

true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requu 
spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his dcL 
and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients, 
man Csesar^ is born, and for ages after we have a Roman En 
pire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave 5 
to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible 2 
of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man ; 
as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony ;3 the Reformation, of 
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;* Methodism, of Wesley;^ Aboli- 
tion, of Clarkson.^ Scipio, Milton called '' the height of 10 
Rome ;"'^ and all history resolves itself very easily into the biog- 
raphy of a few stout and earnest persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his 
feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the 
air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world is 
which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no 
worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a 

1 Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.), the great Roman general, one of the great- 
est the world has ever seen, also preeminent as a statesman and as an orator. 
After subduing Gaul he crossed the Rubicon against his enemies in Rome. 
He became undisputed master of the known world, was made imperator for 
life, and sought to promote the true interests of his country. He laid a strong 
foundation to the imperial power of his successors. 

2 '* Possible," i.e., that which it is possible for man to accomplish. 

3 Saint Antony or Anthony (251-356?), a voluntary hermit of Upper 
Egypt, founder of Monachism, the doctrine of a life of religious seclusion, 
asceticism, and devotion. 

4 George Fox (1624-91), an Englishman, founder of the Society of 
Friends, or Quakers. 

5 John Wesley (1703-91), an Englishman, founder of the religious sect 
of the Methodists. 

6 Thomas Clarkson (i 760-1 846), English philanthropist. He devoted 
his life to the abolition of the slave trade and the relief of the oppressed. 
Through his influence Parliament declared the slave trade illegal in 1807. 

7 See Milton's Paradise Lost, Book IX, line 510. Publius Cornelius 
Afrlcanus Scipio Major (237-183 ? B. C), the greatest Roman general before 
CsBsar. By his defeat of Hannibal he ended the long struggle between 
Rome and Carthage. 



EMERSON. 

sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on 

To him a palace, a statue, a costly book, have an alien 

forbidding air, much Hke a gay equipage, and seem to say 

.Ke that, '* Who are you. Sir?'* Yet they all are his, suitors for 

his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and 

take possession. The picture waits for my' verdict: it is not 

to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That 

popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the 

street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid 

in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious 

ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane,^ 

owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state 

of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then . 

wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince. 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our 
imagination plays us false. Kingdora and lordship, power and 
estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward 
in a small house and common day's work ; but the things of life 
are the same to both ; the sum total of both is the same. Why 
all this deference to Alfred,^ and Scanderbeg,^ and Gustavus ? ^ 
Suppose they were virtuous ; did they wear out virtue ? As great 
a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their pub- 
lic and renowned steps. When private men shall act with origi- 
nal views, the luster will be transferred from the actions of kings 
to those of gentlemen. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so mag- 

1 It is difficult to say where this fable originated. See the story of " The 
Sleeper Awakened" in the Arabian Nights, and the introduction to Shake- 
speare's Taming of the Shrew. 2 See Note 4, p. 34. 

3 Scanderbeg (George Castriota, 1404 ?-68), an Albanian chief who ab- 
jured Islamism, and successfully conducted several crusades against the 
Turks. 

4 Gustavus II (Gustavus Adolphus, 1 594- 1632), King of Sw^eden. Law, 
order, and national spirit were encouraged during his reign, schools were 
everywhere established, roads made, and foreign trade extended. He even 
established model farms. 



SELF-RELIANCE 63 

netized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal 
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The 
joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, 
the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law 
of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and reverse s 
theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and 
represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic ^ by which 
they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right 
and comeliness, the right of every man. 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained 10 
when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee?. 
What is the aboriginal ^ Self, on which a universal reliance may 
be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science- 
baffling star, without parallax,^ without calculable elements, 
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure ac- is 
tions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry 
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, 
and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote 
this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are 
tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis 20 
cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of 
being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, 
is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, 
from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the 
same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first 25 
share the hfe by which things exist, and afterwards see them as 
appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their 
cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here 
are the lungs ^ of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and 

1 Hidden sign. 2 Primitive, first. 

3 Apparent displacement of an object as observed from different points of 
view. The parallax of a heavenly body is used in estimating its distance, and 
decreases as the distance increases ; hence, the exact location of a star so far 
distant as to have no parallax cannot be calculated. 

* The source from which it draws breath; hence, the origin. 



64 EMERSON. 

which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie 
in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of 
its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, 
when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a 

5 passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek 
to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its 
presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discrim- 
inates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involun- 
tary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions 

10 a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, 
but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to 
be disputed. My willful actions and acquisitions are but roving ; 
— the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my 
curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily 

IS the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more 
readily ; for, they do not distinguish between perception and 
notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. 
But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my 
children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind, 

20 — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. 
For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it 
is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God 
speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things ; 

2s should fill the world with his voice ; should scatter forth light, 
nature, time, souls, from the center, of the present thought ; and 
new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is sim- 
ple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, 
teachers, texts, temples fall ; it lives now, and absorbs past and 

30 future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by 
relation to it, — one as much as another. All things are dissolved 
to their center by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty 
and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to 
know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phrase ■ 

35 ology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another 



SELF-RELIANCE, 65 

world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which 
is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the 
child into whom he has cast his ripened being ? Whence, then, 
this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against 
the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but s 
physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light ; 
where it is, is day ; where it was, is night ; and history is an im- 
pertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful 
apologue or parable ^ of my being and. becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic ; he is no longer upright ; he 10 
dares not say '^ I think," " I am," but quotes some saint or sage. 
He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. 
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses 
or to better ones ; they are for what they are ; they exist with 
God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the is 
rose ; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a 
leaf bud has burst, its whole life acts ; in the full-blown flower 
there is no more ; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature 
is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments ahke. But man 
postpones or remembers ; he does not live in the present, but 20 
with reverted^ eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches 
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He 
cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the 
present, above time.^ 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects 25 
dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology 
of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not 
always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We 
are hke children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandaraes^ 
and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and 30 
character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact 
words they spoke ; afterwards, when they come into the point of 

1 See Note 3, p. 44. 2 Turned back. 

3 That is, apart from time past or time to come. 
^ Old women ; grandmothers. 



66 EMERSON, 

view which those had who uttered these sayings, they under- 
stand them, and are willing to let the words go ; for, at any time, 
they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live 
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be 

5 strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new per- 
ception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treas- 
ures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be 
as sweet as the murmiu* of the brook and the rustle of the corn. 
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains un- 

lo said ; probably cannot be said ; for all that we say is the far-off 
remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now 
nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, 
when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accus- 
tomed way ; you shall not discern the footprints of any other ; 

IS you shall not see the face of man ; you shall not hear any 
name; — the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange 
and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take 
the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed 
are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. 

20 There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, 
there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. 
The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causa- 
tion, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms 
itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of 

25 nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, — long intervals of 
time, years, centuries, — are of no account. This which I think 
and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, 
as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what 
is called death. 

30 Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the 
instant of repose ; it resides in the moment of transition from a 
past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to 
an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; 
for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all 

35 reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves 



SELF-RELIANCE, 67 

Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self- 
reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power 
not confident but agent. ^ To talk of rehance is a poor external 
way of speaking. Speak rather of that which reUes, because it 
works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, s 
though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must re- 
volve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when 
we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is 
Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and per- 
meable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and 10 
ride ^ all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as 
on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed One. 
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it con- 
stitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into is 
all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as 
they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, elo- 
quence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect 
as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same 
law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is 20 
in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing 
to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The gen- 
esis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended 
tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of 
every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-suf- 25 
ficing, and therefore self -relying soul. 

Thus all concentrates : let us not rove ; let us sit at home with 
the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of 
men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the 
divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, 30 
for God is here within.^ Let our simplicity judge them, and our 

1 Power not reliant but active. 

2 *' Overpower," etc., i.e., have power over and rule. 

3 The Mohammedans are obliged to take off their shoes before they are 
permitted to enter a mosque. 



68 EMERSON. 

docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and 
fortune beside our native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, 
nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in 

5 communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to 
beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. 
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any 
preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, 
begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always 

lo sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or 
father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said 
to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have 
all men's.^ Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, 
even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your, isolation 

15 must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. 
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune 
you with emphatic trifles. Friend, cHent, child, sickness, fear, 
want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, — 
''Come out unto us." But keep thy state ; come not into their 

20 confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them 
by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through 
my act. '' What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave 
ourselves of the love." > 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and 

25 faith, let us at least resist our temptations ; let us enter into the 
state of war, and wake Thor and Woden,^ courage and constancy, 
in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times 
by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying 
affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived 

30 and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, 
O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived 

1 An allusion to the fact that all men are brothers. 

2 In Norse mythology the god Woden was held to be all-powerful and 
noted for his constancy, while his eldest son Thor, the god of thunder, was 
the personification of strength and courage. 



SELF-RELIANCE, ' 69 

with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the 
truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law 
less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximi- 
ties.^ I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my 
family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but these rela- 5 
tions I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal 
from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself 
any longer for you, or you.^ If you can love me for what I am, 
we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to de- 
serve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. 10 
I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly 
before the sun and moon whatever inly^ rejoices me, and the 
heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you ; if you are 
not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. 
If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to is 
your companions ; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, 
but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and 
all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. 
Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dic- 
tated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, 20 
it will bring us out safe at last. — But so may you give these 
friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, 
to save their sensibiHty. Besides, all persons have their moments 
of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth ; 
then will they justify me, and do the same thing. 25 

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards 
is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism ;'^ and the 
bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild^ his 

1 " I will," etc., i.e., I will agree to govern my conduct only according to 
the dictates of my inner consciousness, of my soul's intuitive sense of right. 

2 You in the singular, i.e., the particular person whom Emerson imagines 
himself as addressing. 3 Within the soul. 

4 The doctrine that Christians are freed from the moral law as set forth in 
the Old Testament by the new dispensation of grace in the Gospel. 

5 Cover or conceal. 



70 EMERSON, 

crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two 
confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven.^ 
You may fulfill your round of duties by clearing yourself in the 
direct^ or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied 

s your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and 
dog ; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also 
neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have 
my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of 
duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can dis- 

10 charge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. 
If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its com- 
mandment one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast 
off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust 

IS himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, 
clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, 
law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong 
as iron necessity is to others! 

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by 

20 distinction society^ he will see the need of these ethics. The 
sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are be- 
come timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, 
afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our 
age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and 

25 women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see 
that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, 
have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force,' 
and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our house- 
keeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our mxarriages, 

30 our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. 
We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where 
strength is born. 

If oiu: young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose 
all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If 

1 Confessed. 



SELF-RELIANCE, 7^ 

the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed 
in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of 
Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that 
he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of 
his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who s 
in turn tries all the professions, who teains it, farms it^ peddles^ 
keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, 
buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, 
like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. 
He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not '' study- lo 
ing a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives 
already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let 
a Stoic 2 open the resources of man, and tell men they are not 
leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves ; that with 
the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear ; that a man is 
is the word made flesh,^ born to shed healing to the nations, 
that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the mo- 
ment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, 
and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank 
and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man 20 
to splendor, and make his name dear to all history. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revo- 
lution in all the offices and relations of men ; in their religion ; in 
their education ; in their pursuits ; their modes of living ; their 
association ; in their property ; in their speculative views. 25 

I. In what prayers do men allow themselves 1 ^ That which 
they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer 

1 '' Teams it," etc., i.e., drives a team or engages in farming as a profes- 
sion. 

2 A disciple of the philosopher Zeno, who founded a sect and taught that 
men should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and should sub- 
mit uncomplainingly to the inevitable ; hence, the name is applied to any 
one who professes to be indifferent to pleasure or pain. 

3 See John i. 14. 

^ * In what prayers," etc., i.e., in what prayers do men allow themselves 
to irdulge. 



72 EMERSON, 

looks abroad arid asks for some foreign addition to come through 
some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural 
and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that 
craves a particular commodity, — anything less than all good, — is' 
5 vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the 
highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and 
jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. 
But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and 
theft. It supposes dualism ^ and not unity in nature and con- 
10 sciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not 
beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the 
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower 
• kneehng with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard through- 
out nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's ''Bon- 
is duca," 2 when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, 

repHes, — 

'^ His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; 
Our valors are our best gods. " 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is 
2o the want of self-reliance : it is infirmity of will. Regret calami- 
ties, if you can thereby help the sufferer ; if not, attend your own 
work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy 
is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit 
down and cry for company, instead of imparting to th-em truth 
25 and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in 
communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is 
joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the 
self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all 
tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our 

1 A twofold division. 

2 Caratach, or Caractacus, was a character in the play of Bonduca (another 
name for Boadicea), written by the English dramatist and poet John Fletcher 
(1579-1625). The scene of the play is laid in ancient Britain, where the 
characters were historical. Audate is another name for the Celtic goddess 
(not god) Audrasta, 



SELF-RELIANCE, 73 

love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not 
need it. We soUcitously and apologetically caress and celebrate 
him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapproba- 
tion. The gods love him because men hated him. ''To the 
persevering mortal," said Zoroaster,^ ''the blessed Immortals ares 
swift." 

As men's prayers are 'a disease of the will, so are their creeds 
a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, 
" Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any 
man with us, and we will obey." Everywhere I am hindered of lo 
meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple 
doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's 
brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it 
prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke,^ a 
Lavoisier,^ a Hutton,^ a Bentham,^ a Fourier,^ it imposes its 15 
classification on other men, and lo ! a new system. In propor- 
tion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the 
objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his 
complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, 
which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on 20 
the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. 
Such is Calvinism,^ Quakerism, Swedenborgism.^ The pupil 
takes the same delight in subordinating everything to the new 
terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a 

1 The founder of the ancient Persian religion. The time in which he lived 
is uncertain. 2 See Note 2, p. 26. 

2 Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-94), illustrious French chemist. He 
discovered the composition of water. 

4 James Hutton (1726-97), great Scotch geologist. He wrote the Theory 
of Rain, and Theory of the Earth. 

5 Jeremy Bentham (i 748-1832), English philosopher and reformer. He 
devoted himself to reforms in legislature and government. 

6 F'rangois Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837), French socialist. 

'^ The doctrine of the followers of John Calvin (1509-64), French theo- 
logian. 

^ The doctrine taught by Emanuel Swedenborg. See Note i, p. 44. 

( 



74 ±LM±LK:iUlW. 

new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, 
that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the 
study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the 
classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily 
5 exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their 
eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe ; the 
luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master 
built. They cannot imagine how you aHens have any right to 
see, — how you can see; '^ It must be somehow that you stole 

lo the hght from us." They do not yet perceive, that light, unsys- 
tematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. 
Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest 
and do well, presently their neat new pinfold ^ will be too strait ^ 
and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the im- 

15 mortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, 
will beam over the universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Trav- 
eling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fasci- 
nation for all educated Americans. They who made England, 

2o Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking 
fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, 
we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler ; the 
wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on 
any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he 

25 is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of 
his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and vir- 
tue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an 
interloper or a valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the 

30 globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that 
the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the 
hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who 
travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not 
carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth 

1 An inclosure for beasts. 2 Narrow. 



SELF-RELIANCE, 75 

among old things. In Thebes,^ in Palmyra,^ his will and mind 
have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to 
ruins. 

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to 
us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, s 
at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. 
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and 
at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, 
the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the 
Vatican,^ and the palaces. I aifect to be intoxicated with sights lo 
and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with 
me wherever I go. 

3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper un- 
soundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect 
is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness, is 
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. 
We imitate ; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind ? 
Our houses are built with foreign taste ; our shelves are garnished 
with foreign ornaments ; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, 
lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the 20 
arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind 
that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his 
own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be 
observed. And why need we copy the Doric ^ or the Gothic^ 
model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint 25 
expression are as . near to us as to any, and if the American 

• 

1 The ruined prehistoric city, capital of Upper Egypt. 

2 A ruined city, founded by Solomon, in an oasis of the Syrian desert, a 
hundred and twenty miles northeast of Damascus. 

^ The residence of the Pope in Rome, the largest palace in the world, 
consisting of over four thousand rooms. It contains the finest existing col- 
lection of marbles, bronzes, frescoes, paintings, gems, and statues. 

4 A style of architecture distinguished for simplicity and strength, which 
originated in Doris in ancient Greece. 

5 A style of architecture derived from the Goths, with high and sharply 
pointed arches and clustered columns. 



76 EMERSON, 

artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done 
by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, 
the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, 
he will create a house in which all these will find themselves 

s fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can 
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's 
cultivation ; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only 
an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do 

lo best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows 
what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is 
the master who could have taught Shakespeare ? ^ Where is the 
master who could have instructed Franklin,^ or Washington, or 
Bacon,^ or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scip- 

is ionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. 
Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. 
Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much 
or dare too much.' There is at this moment for you an utterance 
brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,-* or 

20 trowel^ of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante,^ but 
different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all 
eloquent, with thousand-cloven ^ tongue, deign to repeat itself; 
but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can 
reply to them in the same pitch of voice ; for the ear and the 

25 tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and 

1 See Note 3, p. 29. 

2 Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), American philosopher, statesman, and 
writer. He discovered the nature of lightning, invented the lightning rod, 
performed important diplomatic services during the Revolution, and compiled 
the famous Poor Richard's Almanac. 

3 See Note i, p. 27. 

4 Phidias ( 500 ?-432 ? B.C.), the greatest sculptor of Greece if not of all 
lands. 5 The tool with which they reared the pyramids. 

6 Dante Alighieri (i 265-1 321), the greatest Italian poet, author of the 
Inferno. 

7 Divided into many parts ; that is, capable of speaking in many ways. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 77 

noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce 
the Foreworld^ again. 

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so 
does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the 
improvement of society, and no man improves. s 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it 
gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes ; it is bar- 
barous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific ; 
but this change is not ameHoration. For everything that is 
given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses 10 
old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, 
writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of 
exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose 
property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth 
of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two is 
men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal 
strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the savage with a 
broad ax, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if 
you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send 
the white to his grave. 20 

The civiHzed man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his 
feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support 
of muscle. He has a fine Geneva'^ watch, but he fails of the 
skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac^ 
he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, 25 
the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The sol- 
stice he does not observe ; the equinox he knows as little ; and 
the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. 
His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his 

wit ; the insurance oflice increases the number of accidents ; and 30 

I 

1 A previous state of the world. 

2 Geneva, Switzerland, at one time produced the best watches in the 
world. 

3 An almanac for the use of navigators and astronomers, calculated at the 
Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. 



78 EMERSON, 

it may be a question whether' machinery does not encumber; 
whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Chris- 
tianity intrenched in estabHshments and forms, some vigor of 
wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic ; but in Christendom 

5 where is the Christian ? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the 
standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever 
were. A singular equality may be observed between the great 
men of the first and of the last ages ; nor can all the science, 

lo art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to 
educate greater men than Plutarch's ^ heroes, three or four and 
twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Pho- 
cion,^ Socrates, Anaxagoras,^ Diogenes,^ are great men, but they 
leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called 

15 by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the 
founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are 
only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the 
improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson^ and 
Bering^ accomplished so much in their fishing boats, as to astonish 

20 Parry ^ and Franklin,^ whose equipment exhausted the resoiurces 

1 A Grecian philosopher living in the first century A.D. He was also a 
prolific writer. His most noted work is Parallel Lives, a series of forty-six 
biographies divided into pairs, one taken from Greek and one from Roman 
history, and each accompanied by a psychological and moral comparison be- 
tween the characters described. 2 An Athenian general (402-317 B.C.). 

3 Eminent Greek philosopher (500-428 B.C.). He maintained the eter- 
nity of matter. 

4 A famous Greek cynic philosopher (412 ?-323 ? B.C.). He affected a 
contempt for the comforts of life and the customs of the world. According 
to tradition he lodged in a tub. 

5 Henry Hudson, distinguished English discoverer, discovered Hudson 
River and Hudson Bay. 

6 A Danish navigator (i 680-1 741). He discovered Bering Strait in 1728, 
and ascertained that Asia was not joined to America, as was formerly supposed. 

7 Sir William Edward Parry, English navigator (i 790-1855). In 1819-23 
he penetrated the Arctic regions farther than any previous explorer. 

8 Sir John Franklin (i 786-1847), English Arctic explorer. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 79 

of science and art. Galileo, with an opera glass, discovered a 
more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. 
Columbus^ found the New World in an undecked boat. It is 
curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and 
machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few 5 
years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential 
man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among 
the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon 2 conquered Europe 
by the bivouac,^ which consisted of falling back on naked valor, 
and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impos- lo 
sible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas,^ '' without abolish- 
ing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in 
imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his 
supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his bread him- 
self." 15 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water 
of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not 
rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. 
The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and 
their experience with them. 20 

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on 
governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. ]\Ien 
have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that 
they have come to esteem the rehgious, learned, and civil institu- 
tions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, 25 
because they feel them to be assaults on property. They meas- 
ure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by 

1 Christopher Columbus (about 1436-1506), the discoverer of America. 

2 See note 2, page loi. 

3 An encampment of soldiers in the open air, without tents, each soldier 
remaining dressed, with his weapons at hand. 

^ Emmanuel Augustin Dieudonne, Comte de las Cases ( 1 766-1842); 
author of ''Memorial de St. Helene," and a friend of Napoleon Bonaparte's. 
Note that Emerson's spelling of the name is wrong. He confused it Avith 
that of the great Bartolome de las Casas, the Spanish missionary. 



8o EMERSON. 

what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his 
property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates 
what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by in- 
heritance, or gift, or crime ; then he feels that it is not having ; 
5 it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies 
there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But 
that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, ^ and 
what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait 
the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or 

lo bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man 
breathes. '' Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali,^ '' is 
seeking after thee ; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.'^ 
Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish 
respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous 

IS conventions ; the greater the concourse, and with each, new up- 
roar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Dem- 
ocrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! The 
young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thou- 
sand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon 

20 conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O 
friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a 
method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all 
foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and 
to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is 

25 not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in 
the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently ap- 
pear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows 
that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for 
good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws him- 

30 self unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands 
in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles ; just 

1 Become his own. 

2 An Arabian caliph, surnamed the " Lion of God," a cousin and follower 
of Mohammed. He is distinguished as an author of many maxims and 
proverbs which have been handed down and published. 



SELF-RELIANCE, 8 1 

as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who 
stands on his head. 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, 
and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave 
as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the s 
chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou 
hast chained the wheel of Chance,^ and shalt sit hereafter out of 
fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the 
recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or 
some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think lo 
good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing 
can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace 
but the -triumph of principles. 

1 Fortuna, the goddess of fortune or chance in Roman mythology, was 
represented with her eyes bound, standing on a ball or wheel to indicate that 
luck rolls, like a ball, without choice. 



COMPENSATION. 



The wings of Time are black and white. 
Pied 1 with morning and with night. 
Mountain tall and ocean deep 
Trembling balance duly keep. 
In changing moon, in tidal wave, 
Glows the feud of Want and Have. 
Gauge of more and less through space 
Electric star and pencil plays. 
The lonely Earth amid the balls 2 
That hurry through the eternal halls,^ 
A makeweight ^ flying to the void, 
Supplemental asteroid, 
Or compensatory spark. 
Shoots across the neutral Dark. 

1 Spotted. 2 Planets. 3 Space, 

* Something added to fill a deficiency. 



83 



Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine, 
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine : 
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive, 
None from its stock that vine can reave. ^ 
Fear not, then, thou child infirm, 
There's no god dare wrong a worm. 
Laurel crowns ^ cleave to deserts. 
And power to him who power exerts ; 
Hast not thy share ? On winged feet, 
Lo ! it rushes thee to meet ; 
And all that Nature made thy own, 
Floating in air or pent ^ in stone. 
Will rive ^ the hills and swim the sea, 
And, like thy shadow, follow thee. 

1 Take away. 

2 Honors, from the custom of the ancient Greeks to use laurel crowns as 
a mark of honor. 

^ Confined. ^ Rend asunder. 



84 



COMPENSATION. 

EVER since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse 
on Compensation : for it seemed to me when very young, 
that on this subject hfe was ahead of theology, and the people 
knew more than the preachers taught. The documents,^ too, 
from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by s 
their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep ; 
for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the 
transactions of the street, the farm, and the dwelling house, 
greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of character, 
the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me, also, k 
that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present 
action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradi- 
tion, and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation 
of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always 
and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared, more- i^ 
over, that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any resem- 
blance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes 
revealed to us, it would be a star^ in many dark hours and 
crooked passages in our journey that would not suffer us to lose 
our way. 2c 

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at 
church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, un- 
folded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judg- 
ment. He assumed, that judgment is not executed in this world ; 
that the wicked are successful ; that the good are miserable ; and 25 
then urged from reason and from Scripture a compensation to 

^ Data. 2 A guiding star ; hence, guide. 

85 



86 EMERSON, 

be made to both parties in the next Kfe. No offense appeared 
to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine. As far as I 
could observe, when the meeting broke up, they separated with- 
out remark on the sermon. 

5 Yet what was the import ^ of this teaching? What did the 
preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the 
present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, 
dress, luxury, are had^ by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are 
poor and despised ; and that a compensation is to be made to 

10 these last hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications another 
day, — bank stock and doubloons,^ venison and champagne? 
This must be the compensation intended ; for what else ? Is it 
that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve 
men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference 

15 the disciple would draw was, — " We are to have such a good 
time as the sinners have now;" — or, to push it to its extreme 
import, — " You sin now ; we shall sin by and by ; we would sin 
now, if we could ; not beii>g successful, we expect our revenge 
to-morrow." 

2o The fallacy lay in the immense concession, that the bad are 
successful ; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the 
preacher consisted in deferring* to the base estimate of the 
market^ of what constitutes a manly success, instead of confront- 
ing and convicting the world from the truth; announcing the 

25 presence of the soul ; the omnipotence of the will : and so 
establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and false- 
hood. 

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the 
day, and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when 

30 occasionally they treat the related topics. I think that our pop- 
ular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over 
the superstitions it has displaced. But men are better than this 

1 Meaning. 2 Possessed. 

3 Spanish and Portuguese coins worth about $15.60 each. 

4 Bowing to ; accepting. ^ Those engaged in commercial life. 



COMPENSA TION, 8 7 

theology. Their daily hfe gives it the lie.^ Every ingenuous 
and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own ex- 
perience ; and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which they 
cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know. That 
which they hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought, if s 
said in conversation, would probably be questioned in silence. 
If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the 
divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well 
enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his 
incapacity to make his own statement. 10 

I shall attempt to record some facts that indicate the path of 
the law of Compensation ; happy beyond my expectation, if I 
shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle. 

PoLARiTY,2 or actiou and reaction, we meet in every part of 
nature; in darkness and Hght; in heat and cold; in the ebb is 
and flow of waters ; in male and female ; in the inspiration and 
expiration of plants and animals ; in the equation of quantity 
and quality in the fluids of the animal body ; in the systole^ and 
diastole* of the heart ; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound ; 
in the centrifugal^ and centripetal <5 gravity; in electricity, gal- 20 
vanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce'^ magnetism at one 
end of a needle ; the opposite magnetism takes place at the other 
end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, 
you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, 
so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make 25 
it whole ; as, spirit, matter ; man, woman ; odd, even ; subjec- 
tive, objective ; in, out ; upper, under ; motion, rest ; yea, nay. 

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The 

1 Proves it false. 2 See Note 3, p. 33. 

3 Contraction of the heart and arteries. 

* Dilatation of the heart and arteries. 

5 Tending to recede from the center. 

^ Tending to move towards the center. 

■^ Develop. 



88 EMERSON, 

entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There 
is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and 
night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel 
of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, 

s so grand in the elements, is repeated within these small bounda- 
ries. For example, in the animal kingdom the physiologist has 
observed that no creatures are favorites, but a certain compensa- 
tion balances every gift and every defect. A surplusage^ given 
to one part is paid out of a reduction from another part of the 

lo same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged, the trunk 
and extremities are cut short. 

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What 
we gain in power is lost in time ; and the converse. The periodic 
or compensating errors of the planets is another instance. The 

IS influences of climate and soil in political history is another. 
The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed 
fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions. 

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. 
Every excess causes a defect ; every defect an excess. Every 

20 sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which 
is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. 
It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain 
of wit there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, 
you have gained something else ; and for everything you gain, 

25 you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased ^ that 
use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out 
of the man what she puts into his chest, swells the estate, but 
kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The 
waves of the sea do not . more speedily seek a level from their 

30 loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equalize 
themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that 
puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, 
substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too 

1 Excess. 2 xhat is, their needs or wants are incre^se4, 



COMPENSA TION. 89 

Strong and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad 
citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him? — 
nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are 
getting along in the dame's 1 classes at the village school, and 
love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus s 
she contrives to intenerate^ the granite and felspar, takes the 
boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true. 

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But 
the President has paid dear for his White House. ^ It has com- 
monly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attri- 10 
butes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appear- 
ance before the world, he is content to eat dust^ before the real 
masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or do men desire 
the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius? Neither 
has this an immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is 15 
great, and overlooks^ thousands, has the charges of that emi- 
nence. With every influx of light comes new danger. Has he 
light? he must bear witness to the light, and always outrun that 
sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity 
to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate father 20 
and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and 
admires and covets? — he must cast behind him their admiration, 
and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and become a byword 
and a hissing. 

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain 25 
to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mis- 
managed long. Res nolunt diu male administrari, ^ Though no 
checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. 
If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If 
you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make 30 
the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law 

1 Schoolmistress. 2 Soften. 

3 The official residence of the President in Washington. 

4 ** Eat dust," i.e., humble himself. 5 Superintends. 
6 The Latin rendering of the sentence preceding. 



90 EMERSON. 

is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the government is 
a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an overcharge of 
energy in the citizen, and Hfe glows with a fiercer flame. The 
true hfe and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors 
5 or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great 
indiff erency 1 under all varieties of circumstances. Under all 
governments the influence of character remains the same, — in 
Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the primeval 
despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must have 

10 been as free as culture could make him. 

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is repre- 
sented in every one of its particles. Everything in nature con- 
tains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one 
hidden stuff ; as the naturalist sees one type under every meta- 

i: morphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a 
swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. 
Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, 
but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances,^ hin- 
drances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every oc- 

2o cupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and 
a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of 
human life ; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course 
and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the 
whole man, and recite all his destiny. 

25 The world globes itself in a drop of dew.^ The microscope 
cannot find the animalcule* which is less perfect for being little. 
Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs 
of reproduction that take hold on eternity, — all find room to 
consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every 

30 act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears 
with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the 

1 Impartiality. 2 Things which help its progress. 

3 ** The world," etc., i.e., the laws which make the world a globe give 
the same shape to a drop of dew. 

•* An animal so small as to be nearly or quite invisible to the naked eye. 



COMPENSA TION, 9 1 

universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good 
is there, so is the evil ; if the affinity, so the repulsion ; if the 
force, so the limitation. 

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, 
which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel s 
its inspiration ; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. 
'' It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is 
not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts 
of life. 01 icvj3oc Acbg del evninrovai,^ — The dice of God are 
always loaded.^ The world looks like a multiphcation table, or lo 
a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances 
itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor^ more nor 
less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is 
punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence 
and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal neces- is 
sity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If 
you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, 
you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind. 

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in 
a twofold manner ; first, in the thing, or in real nature ; and sec- 20 
ondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the 
circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in the 
thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circum- 
stance is seen by the understanding ; it is inseparable from the 
thing, but is often spread over a long time, and so does not be- ^5 
come distinct until after many years. The specific stripes^ may 
follow late after the offense, but they follow because they accom- 
pany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punish- 
ment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the 
pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, 30 

1 //oi koo'boi Deeds at ilpiptoosee — the Greek of the sentence which 
follows. 

2 '* The dice," etc., i.e., God does not play a game of chance. 

3 Neither. 

* Blows made with a lash ; hence, punishment. 



92 EMERSON. 

seed and fruit, cannot be severed ; for the effect already blooms 
in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the 
seed. 

Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be dis- 

s parted, 1 we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate ; for 
example, — to gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the 
senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity of man 
has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem, — 
how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual 

lo bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral 
fair ; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean ojff this upper surface 
so thin as to leave it bottomless ; to get a one end^ without an 
other end. The soul says. Eat; the body would feast. The 
soul says. The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul ; 

IS the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have do- 
minion over all things to the ends of virtue ; the body would have 
the power over things to its own ends. 

The soul strives amain ^ to live and work through all things. 
It would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it, — 

20 power, pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims 
to be somebody; to set up for himself ; to truck and higgle for 
a private good ; and, in particulars, to ride, that he may ride ; to 
dress, that he may be dressed; to eat, that he may eat; and to 
govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to be great ; they would 

25 have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be 
great is to possess one side of nature, — the sweet, without the 
other side, — the bitter. 

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to 
this day, it must be owned, no projector has had the smallest suc- 

30 cess. The parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is 
taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power 
out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separate them from 
the whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual 

1 Divided. 2 Vigorously. 



COMPENSA TION. 93 

good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no out- 
side, or a light without a shadow. '' Drive out nature with a 
fork, she comes running back."^ 

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise 
seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not 5 
know ; that they do not touch him ; — but the brag is on his lips, 
the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part, 
they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped 
them in form, and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted 
his life, and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much 10 
death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make this sep- 
aration of the good from the tax, that the experiment would not 
be tried, — since to try it is to be mad, — but for the circum- 
stance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and 
separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man is 
ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the 
sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt ; he 
sees the mermaid's ^ head, but not the dragon's tail ; and thinks 
he can cut off that which he would have, from that which he 
would not have. '' How secret art thou who dwellest in the 20 
highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling 
with an unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon 
such as have unbridled desires! "^ 

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, 
of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue 25 
in Uterature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,^ Supreme 
Mind ; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base ac- 
tions, they involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the 
hands 5 of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of 

1 A proverb, quoted by Horace, the origin of which is lost in antiquity. 

2 A fabled marine being, represented as having the upper part of the body 
like a woman and the lower part like a fish, serpent, or dragon. 

3 St. Augustine, Confessions, Book I. 

* Jupiter, Jove, or Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks and Romans. 
5 Limiting the power. 



94 EMERSON, 

England. 1 Prometheus ^ knows one secret which Jove must bar- 
gain for ; Minerva,^ another. . He cannot get his own thunders ; 
Minerva keeps the key of them. 

" Of all the gods, I only know the keys 
5 That ope the solid doors within whose vaults 

His thunders sleep." 

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its 

moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; 

and it would seem impossible for any fable to be invented and 
lo get any currency which was not moral. Aurora^ forgot to ask 

youth for her lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. 

Achilles ^ is not quite invulnerable ; the sacred waters did not 
' wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried,^ in the 

1 Parliament has supreme power in England. 

2 Prometheus, in Greek mythology the regenerator of mankind, used 
knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil. He stole Jupiter's fire and taught 
mortals how to use it. Jupiter punished Jiim by chaining him to a rock 
where he was tortured by an eagle. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven 
portending the fall of Jupiter, and only Prometheus knew the secret of avert- 
ing it. Jupiter offered him his freedom if he would reveal it. For a long 
time he steadfastly refused, and endured untold tortures ; but at length, 
according to some traditions, he revealed the secret that if Jupiter became 
the father of a son by Thetis, that son would deprive him of his sovereignty. 
Prometheus was thereupon set free. According to another story he never 
divulged the secret, but was at length released by Hercules, who killed the 
eagle. 

3 Minerva, Athena, or Pallas, a goddess in Greek and Roman mythology, 
who sprang full-armed from the head of her father Jupiter. She was the god- 
dess of wisdom and of war, and sometimes wielded Jupiter's thunderbolts. 

^ Aurora, Roman goddess of the dawn, became enamored of Tithonus, 
son of Laomedon, King of Troy. She stole him away and persuaded Jupiter 
to grant him immortality, but she forgot to have youth added to the gift, and 
soon began to discern that he was growing old. She grew angry at this and 
finally turned him into a grasshopper. 

5 Achilles is the hero of the Iliad, Homer's great epic. His mother, 
Thetis, dipped him in the river Styx to render him immortal. 

6 The Nibelungenlied is the great epic poem of the old Germans, as the 



COMPENSATION, ' 95 

Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back 
whilst he was bathing in the dragon's blood, and that spot which 
it covered is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack in 
everything God has made. It would seem, there is always this 
vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into the s 
wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold 
hohday, and to shake itself free of the old laws, — this back- 
stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal ; that 
in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold. 

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis,^ who keeps watch in lo 
the universe, and lets no offense go unchastised. The Furies,^ 
they said, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven 
should transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets 
related that stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had 
an occult sympathy with the wrongs of their owners ; that the is 
belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan hero over the 
field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword which 
Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax^ fell They 
recorded, that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theagenes,* 
a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it by night, and en- 20 
deavored to throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved 
it from its pedestal, and was crushed to death beneath its fall. 

Iliad is of the ancient Greeks. Siegfried is the mythical hero of the former 
as Achilles is of the latter story. 

1 In Greek mythology, a goddess personifying moral reverence for law. 
She visited the righteous anger of the gods upon the proud and insolent. 

2 The Furies were three mythological deities, Alecto, Tisiphone, and 
Megaera, who punished crimes by their secret stings. 

3 Ajax and Hector are mythological heroes in the Trojan War as related 
in the Iliad, the former a Greek and the latter a Trojan. After a personal 
combat, they exchanged arms, and when subsequently Ajax committed sui- 
cide, he used the sword which had been Hector's, and when Achilles killed 
Hector, he used the belt which had belonged to Ajax to fasten the corpse to 
his chariot or car. 

4 See Pausanias's Description of Greece, Book VI, line 11. Theagenes, 
an inhabitant of Thasos, an island in the y^gean Sea, was renowned for his 
strength and swiftness and his numerous victories in athletic contests. 



96 • EMERSON, 

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from 
thought above the will of the writer. That is the best part of 
each writer, which has nothing private in it ; that which he does 
not know, that which flowed out of his constitution, and not 
s from his too active invention ; that which in the study of a single 
artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many, you 
would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias ^ it is not, but 
the work of man in that early Hellenic ^ world, that I would 
know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however con- 

10 venient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest crit- 
icism. We are to see that which man was tending to do in a 
given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, 
by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante,^ of Shakespeare,^ 
the organ whereby man at the moment wrought. 

IS Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs 
of all nations, which are always the Kterature of reason, or the 
statements of an absolute truth, without qualification. Proverbs, 
like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the in- 
tuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, 

20 will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer 
him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of 
laws which the pulpit, the senate, and the college deny, is hourly 
preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, 
whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds 

25 and flies. 

All things are double, one against another. — Tit for tat ; an 
eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood ; measure 
for measure ; love for love. — Give and it shall be given you. — 
He that watereth shall be watered himself. — What will you have? 

30 quoth God; pay for it and take it. — Nothing venture, nothing 
have. — Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast done, no 
more, no less.^ — Who doth not work shall not eat. — Harm 
watch, harm catch. — Curses always recoil on the head of him 

1 See Note 4, p. 76. 2 Greek. « See Note 6, p. 76. 

^ See Note 3, p. 29. 



COMPENSA TION, 9 7 

who imprecates them. — If you put a chain around the neck of 
a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own. — Bad 
counsel confounds the adviser. — The Devil is an ass. 

It is thus written, because it is thus in hfe. Our action is 
overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of 5 
nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, 
but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with 
the poles of the world. 

A man cannot speak, but he judges himself. With his will, or 
against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his compan- 10 
ions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. 
It is a thread-ball 1 thrown at a mark, but the other end remains 
in the thrower's bag. Or, rather, it is a harpoon hurled at the 
whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and if 
the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to t.s 
cut the steersman in twain, or to sink the boat. 

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. " No man 
had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said 
Burke.2 The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he 
excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate 20 
it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the 
door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat 
men as pawns ^ and ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. 
If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The senses 
would make things of all persons ; of women, of children, of 25 
the poor. The vulgar proverb, '' I will get it from his purse or 
get it from his skin,** is sound philosophy. 

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are 
speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand 

1 A ball of thread. 

2 Edmund Burke (1729-97), Irish statesman, orator, and political writer, 
rlis best known works are his Speech on American Conciliation and Reflec- 
tions on the French Revolution. 

3 A piece of lowest rank in the game of chess ; hence, a mere figure to be 
moved about at the will of another. 



98 EMERSON, 

in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in 
meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two currents 
of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration ^ of nature. 
But as soon as there is any departure from simpHcity, and attempt 

5 at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbor 
feels the wrong ; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk 
from him ; his eyes no longer seek mine ; there is war between 
us ; there is hate in him and fear in me. 

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all un- 

lojust accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the 
same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the 
herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is 
rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though 
you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. 

IS Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes 
are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered 2 
over government and property. That obscene ^ bird is not 
there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be 
revised. 

20 Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly 
follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of 
cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,^ the awe of prosper- 
ity, the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on 
itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the 

25 tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart and mind 
of man. 

1 A penetrating between other substances. 

2 *' Fear," etc., i.e., fear has presaged evil, made faces, and spoken inco- 
herently. 3 Ill-omened. 

4 Polycrates, a celebrated Greek tyrant of Samos, had such unvarying 
good fortune that he was counseled to cast from him that which he valued 
most in order to allay the jealousy of the gods. Accordingly he threw into 
the sea an emerald ring of extraordinary beauty ; but in a few days he 
regained it from inside a fish presented to him by a fisherman. Soon after 
this Polycrates' prosperity deserted him and he suffered an ignominious death 
on the cross. 



COMFENSA TION, 99 

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best 
to pay scot and lot^ as they go along, and that a man often pays 
dear for a small frugahty. The borrower runs in his own debt. 
Has a man gained anything who has received a hmidred favors 
and rendered none ? Has he gained by borrowing, through in- s 
dolence or cunning, his neighbor's wares, or horses, or money? 
There arises on the deed the instant acknowledgment of benefit 
on the one part, and of debt on the other ; that is, of superiority 
and inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory of him- 
self and his neighbor ; and every new transaction alters, accord- lo 
ing to its nature, their relation to each other. He may soon 
come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than 
to have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that ''the highest 
price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it." 

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of hfe, and is 
know that it is the part of prudence to face every claimant, and 
pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. 
Always pay ; for, first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Per- 
sons and events may stand for a time between you and justice, 
but it is only a postponement. You must pay at last your own 20 
debt. If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only 
loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for 
every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great 
who confers the most benefits. He is base — and that is the 
one base thing in the universe — to receive favors and render 25 
none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those 
from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit 
we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, 
cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying 
in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm^ worms. Pay it 30 
away quickly in some sort. ^ 

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, 

1 Scot and lot, formerly a parish assessment laid on subjects according to 
their ability. 

2 Beget, 3 Manner. 



lOO EMERSON, 

say the prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, 
a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some apphcation of good sense to a 
common want. It is best to pay in your land a skillful gardener, 
or to buy good sense applied 'to gardening; in your sailor, good 

s sense applied to navigation ; in the house, good sense appKed 
to cooking, sewing, serving ; in your agent, good sense applied 
to accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your presence, or 
spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of the dual 
constitution of things, in labor as in Hfe there can be no cheat- 

10 ing. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles him- 
self. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof 
wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may 
be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, 
knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These 

IS ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the 
mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the de- 
faulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and 
moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the opera- 
tive. The law of nature is. Do the thing, and you shall have the 

20 power : but they who do not the thing have not the power. 

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a 
stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense 
illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The 
absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that everything 

25 has its price, — and if that price is not paid, not that thing but 
something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get any- 
thing without its price, — is not less sublime in the columns of a 
leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and dark- 
ness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt 

30 that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those pro- 
cesses with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle 
on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his plumb and 
foot rule, which stand as manifest ii?. the footing of the shop bill 
as in the history of a state, — do recommend to him his trade, 

35 and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination. 



COMPENSA TION. i O I 

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to 
assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and sub- 
stances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds 
that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den 
in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the 5 
earth is made of glass.^ Commit a crime, and it seems as if a 
coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods 
the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You 
cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot- 
track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or 10 
clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws 
and substances of nature — water, snow, wind, gravitation — 
become penalties to the thief. 

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all 
right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathe- is 
matically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. 
The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every- 
thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm ; 
but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon,^ when he ap- 
proached, cast down their colors and from enemies became 20 
friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offense, poverty, 
prove benefactors : — 

^' Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave, and power and deity, 
Yet in themselves are nothing.'* 25 

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As 
no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, 
so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful 

1 There is no place where you can hide ; every spot will be transparent. 

2 Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-182 1), Emperor of France. For many 
years he was one of the most successful generals the world has ever seen, 
and he seemed destined to conquer the whole of Europe, but was finally 
defeated at Waterloo by the English and Prussians, and exiled to St. Helena, 
where he died. 



102 EMERSON. 

to him. The stag in the fable ^ admired his horns and blamed 
his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and after- 
wards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every 
man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man thor- 
5 oughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so 
no man has a thorough acquaintance w4th the hindrances or 
talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the 
triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a 
defect of temper that unfits him to live in society ? Thereby he 

lo is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self- 
help ; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with 
pearl. 

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation 
which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we 

15 are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is 
always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of 
advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, 
defeated, he has a chance to learn something ; he has been put 
on his wits, on his manhood ; he has gained facts ; learns his 

2o ignorance ; is cured of the insanity of conceit ; has got modera- 
tion and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of 
his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his 
weak point. The wound cicatrizes ^ and falls off from him like 
a dead skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed 

25 on invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be de- 
fended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against 
me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as 
honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that 
lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to 

30 which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich 
Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he 
kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the tempta- 
tion we resist. 

1 One of ^sop's fables. 

2 Heals by forming a skin over dead flesh. 



COMPENSA TION. 1 03 

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and 
enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts 
and bars are not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness 
in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their life long, under 
the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as 5 
impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as 
for a thing to be and not to be at the same time. There is a 
third silent party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of 
things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfillment of every con- 
tract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve 10 
an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your 
debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment 
is withholden,! the better for you; for compound interest on 
compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.^ 

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat 15 
nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It 
makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant 
or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving 
themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man 
voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour 20 
of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole consti- 
tution. It persecutes a principle ; it would whip a right ; it 
would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage 
upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It re- 
sembles the prank of boys, who run with fire engines to put 25 
out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate 
spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr 
cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of 
fame ; every prison, a more illustrious abode ; every burned 
book or house enlightens the world ; every suppressed or ex- 30 
punged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. 
Hours of sanity and consideration are always arriving to com- 
munities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen, and the mar- 
tyrs are justified. 

1 Old form of '' withheld. '^ 2 Treasury. 



104 EMERSON, 

Thus do all things preach the indiiferency of circumstances. 
The man is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. 
Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But the 
doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. The 
5 thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, — What boots ^ 
it to do well? there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any 
good, I must pay for it ; if I lose any good, I gain some other ; 
all actions are indifferent. 

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, 

loits own nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. 
The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose 
waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal 2 
abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a 
part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding 

15 negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, 
and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from 
thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing, 
Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade, on 
which, as a background, the living universe paints itself forth, but 

2b no fact is begotten by it ; it cannot work ; for it is not. It can- 
not work any good ; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inas- 
much as it is worse not to be than to be. 

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because 
the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not 

25 come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There 
is no stunning confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. 
Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries 
the malignity and the lie with him, he so far deceases from 
nature. In some manner there will be a demonstration of the 

30 wrong to the understanding also ; but should we not see it, this 
deadly deduction makes square the eternal account. 

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of 
rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to 
virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of 
1 Profits. 2 See Note 2, p. 63. 



CO MP ENS A TION. 1 05 

being. In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add 
to the world ; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and 
Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the Hmits of the hori- 
zon. There can be no excess to love ; none to knowledge ; none 
to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest s 
sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism,^ 
never a Pessimism. 

His Hfe is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. 
Our instinct uses " more '' and " less " in application to man, of 
the presence of the soul, and not of its absence ; the brave man i 
is greater than the coward ; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is 
more a man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no 
tax on the good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God him- 
self, or absolute existence without any comparative. Material 
good has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no i 
root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But all the 
good of nature is the soul's, and may be had, if paid for in nature's 
lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow. 
I no longer wish to meet^ a good I do not earn, for example, to 
find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new 2 
burdens. I do not wish more external goods, — neither posses- 
sions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is appar- 
ent ; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge 
that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig 
up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I 2 
contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom 
of St. Bernard,'^ — '^Nothing can work me damage except my- 
self ; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never 
am a real sufferer but by my own fault." 

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequali- 3 

1 The doctrine that everything in nature is ordered for the best. Pessi- 
mism is the reverse. 

2 To receive, or have bestowed on me. 

3 St. Bernard of Clairvaux, France (1091-1153), one of the most influen- 
tial theologians of the middle ages. 



io6 EMERSON. 

ties of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the 
distinction of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain ; 
how not feel indignation or malevolence towards More? Look 
at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not 
5 well what to make of it. He almost shuns their eye ; he fears 
they will upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a 
great injustice. But see the facts nearly, and these mountainous 
inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun melts the 
iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, 

lo this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my 
brother, and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and out- 
done by great neighbors, I can yet love ; I can still receive ; and 
he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby 
I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for 

15 me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and 
envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to appropriate. all 
things. Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by 
love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious do- 
main. His virtue, — is not that mine ? His wit, — if it cannot 

20 be made mine, it is not wit. 

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes 
which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are ad- 
vertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by 
this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its 

25 friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shellfish crawls out 
of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its 
growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the 
vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in 
some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations 

30 hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, a transparent 
fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, 
as in most men, an indurated^ heterogeneous 2 fabric of many 
dates, and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. 
Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely 

1 Hardened. 2 Composed of differing things. 



COMPENSATION. 1 07 

recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the out- 
ward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circum- 
stances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But 
to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not 
cooperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by 5 
shocks. 

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels 
go. We do not see that they only go out, that archangels may 
come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in 
the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence, ic 
We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recre- 
ate^ that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old 
tent, where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe 
that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot 
again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and ij 
weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, '' Up and on- 
ward f orevermore ! " We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither 
will we rely on the new ; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, 
like those monsters who look backwards. 

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to 2( 
the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, 
a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of 
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But 
the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all 
facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which 2, 
seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect 
of a guide or genius ; for it commonly operates revolutions in 
our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which 
was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted ^ occupation, or a 
household, or style of hving, and allows the formation of new 3 
ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or 
constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception 
of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next 
years; and the man or woman who would have remained a 

1 Create again. 2 Customary. 



lo8 EMERSON, 

sunny garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much 
sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect 
of the gardener, is made the banian i of the forest, yielding shade 
and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men. 

1 Banyan, an East Indian tree of the mulberry family. Aerial roots 
descending from the branches become fixed in the ground, and thicken into 
supports or pillars. Thus the branches spread over an immense area, and a 
single tree has the appearance of a whole grove. 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR 
STUDY. 

In most cases all the reading of any author that the average stu- 
dent has time for in his school course can serve only to set him on his 
way to some of the vast treasure houses of wisdom and satisfaction, 
and to stimulate his desire to explore still further the paths on which 
he has been started. The portion of an author's work best fitted 
for this beginning, then, is that which will make the way seem most 
attractive, and will present the most faithful and the most inspiring 
picture of the goal of the pilgrimage. This is particularly true of a 
philosophical essayist like Emerson. So, in selecting the essays for 
this Kttle volume from the great wealth of material open to the stu- 
dent of Emerson, two ideas have been uppermost in mind: first, to 
choose those that experience has shown to possess the most immediate 
appeal to young people; and second, to include those that most 
simply present the fundamental ideas that pervade all of Emerson's 
writing; for as "Man and Nature are one,'' so is Emerson's thought 
about man, and nature, and life, under whatever title it may appear. 

The problems confronting the more or less immature pupil as he 
first grapples with this thought are many; but paramount in im- 
portance and in difiiculty, perhaps, are, first, the task of interpreting 
Emerson's thought into the pupil's own experience and interests; 
and second, the necessity which rests upon the pupil of learning to 
think, not with the author, but for himself. The way to each of these 
ends must be found largely by the individual pupil following and 
cooperating with the suggestions of the resourceful teacher. The 
introduction, notes, and questions accompanying the selections from 
the essays, however, are designed to suggest some of the ways in which 
a beginning may be made. 

It is a popular assumption that secondary school pupils cannot or, 
at any rate, do not think. The successful teacher and the average 

109 



no NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

student know, however, that pupils are wiUing and ready to think, 
so far as their minds can range, about things that come within their 
realm of interests. In this respect they are about like the rest of us. 
As thinkers they differ from Emerson primarily in their range of in- 
terests. 

Manifestly then the first thing for the pupil to do as he approaches 
the study of Emerson is to endeavor under the inspiration of his 
teacher to enlarge his horizon to take in the author's interests, and to 
strive to see clearly how Emerson's seemingly remote philosophy 
lights up the borderland of schoolboy thought, because to Emerson 
everything, "the shop, the plow, and the leger," are phases of the 
'4ike cause by which light undulates and poets sing," and "one 
design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest 
trench." This is the difficult task. The soil is hard and the hand of 
the tiller often unskilled, but the seed is virile and of long life, and the 
harvest will come in good time. 

To secure this first common ground of interest, in the case of Emer- 
son where personality is so large a factor, the pupil should first, per- 
haps, come to understand something of the man himself with the 
emphasis upon the things that appeal to youth. Emerson's life is 
rather barren of incident, but there are compelling qualities of char- 
acter that will arouse enthusiasm. His firm independence, his belief 
in himself, his "optimistic Americanism," his lofty idealism, his con- 
vincing sincerity, are traits that may serve as stepping-stones to the 
phases of his thought to which they lead. Emerson's presentation 
of "The American Scholar" as a man of action, instead of a recluse, 
offers a vantage ground from which many excursions into his phi- 
losophy may be made. The group of questions and topics accompany- 
ing each essay may be suggestive of some of the fields into which the 
student's thought may be turned. But first and always the pupil 
must feel that though the notes and the teacher may be of service 
at the outset, they are only media of communication between his 
mind and the great source of power that lies in Emerson's thought. 

The second main thought always to be kept in mind is that the 
pupil should become, "not the parrot of other men's thinking," but 
"Man thinking." This is the end and consummation of the first, 
and follows it more readily than we sometimes believe. Whether 
Emerson's ideas arouse sympathy or antagonism in the mind of the 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. ill 

pupil, matters little. If the effort to transform what Emerson liked 
to call "the energy of ideas" or "ecstasy" into energy that can be 
used by the mind of the pupil has been successful, the reaction in 
thought is secured; for, as Professor Woodberry says, "No man rises 
from reading him without feeling more unshackled." Then the 

"compensatory spark 
Shoots across the neutral Dark," 

and the energy imparted may be left to seek its expression in a life of 
action. 

The exact method of studying the essays will always vary with 
the varying conditions of maturity of pupils, time, resources for 
collateral reading, and the tastes of teacher and pupil. In some 
respects the study of the essay is less difficult than the reading of 
other forms of literary work. The essay makes its appeal to the 
understanding rather than to the imagination, to the emotions, or to 
the artistic taste. It is generally practical in its nature. On the other 
hand, however, it does not possess the compelling interest of plot, as 
in the novel, or the fascination of character study, as in the drama. 
It often, also, deals with topics not inherently interesting to the 
average boy or girl. For these reasons, then, it is especially necessary 
that the student approach the reading with the sincere conviction 
that there is something in the essay well worth his while, and with an 
earnest purpose to find out what that something is. Here, care and 
skill in planning the preliminary work and good judgment in decid- 
ing how thoroughly the essay is to be mastered and just what parts 
may best be passed rapidly, are all important; and the student should 
respond readily to the suggestions of the teacher. 

With most of Emerson's essays it is doubtful if the average pupil 
can be turned loose to make the first reading as a whole for himself, 
as can be done in the case of the essays of Addison or of Irving. Many 
would fail to get the thought and so acquire at the outset a distaste 
for the author and his topic, which it would be hard for the most 
enthusiastic teacher to overcome. Although the most of the essays 
do not readily lend themselves to the outline plan, it may be best in 
most cases that the pupil be given a brief statement of the thought of 
a certain portion of the essay in advance of his reading, and that the 
details of the thought, the reasonableness of it, the logical* conclu- 



112 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

sions to be drawn, and, always, the practical bearing of it upon the 
pupiFs life be reserved for subsequent class discussion. 

Such topics as structure, choice of words, types of sentences, 
peculiarities of style, etc., no doubt have their place in connection 
with essay study, but they are usually incidental and should not be 
forced or pursued to the detriment of the effectiveness of the thought. 

t 

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

During the five years following Emerson's resignation of his pas- 
torate of the Second Church in Boston in September, 1832, which 
was his virtual withdrawal from the ministry, the fundamental ideas 
of his philosophy were conceived. The remainder of his life was de- 
voted to working out and expressing the thoughts that took shape 
between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-five. He had cast away 
from the old anchorage; he must find a new. These were years of 
stress. He had stood aside from the world; he felt that the world 
did not want him; yet he had resolved to do his part. *^He had 
achieved self-reliance"; he was sure of the most satisfactory com- 
pensation, the approval of his own soul; he was making himself 
"The American Scholar." "Hereafter," he writes, "I design not to 
utter any speech, poem, or book that is not entirely and peculiarly 
my work." 

He came to feel that the entire universe was his own, and that 
Nature, God, and Man were one. His sensitive soul revolted at the 
materialistic ideas of the preceding generations. He had been born 
to a philosophy which had denied the power of the mind to form ideas 
except from impressions received through the senses, which aflSirmed 
that morality is a thing based on custom or utility. Both reason 
and intuition, which was the basis of his faith, told him that the mind 
has creative energy, that it has a faculty transcending the senses and 
the understanding. Hence, Emerson and those whom his ideas at- 
tracted were called Transcendentalists, a term generally applied to 
those who believe that reality can be reached by processes of thought. 

The first expression of "The New Thought," as Transcendentalism 
was sometimes called, was made in Nature, published in 1836. This 
little "arsenal of ideas" attracted little attention at first, but it is 



NOTES UDY. 113 

the storehouse of powc /nstantly drew. It 

contains the embryonic ic >phy. 

The first application of tht tc ^ made in his address 

on The American Scholar dehve. a year . . Of this Bronson Al- 
cott, father of the author of Little Men and Little Women, says, "I 
beHeve that it was the first adequate statement of the new views that 
really attracted general attention. I had the good fortune to hear 
that address; and I shall not forget the delight with which I heard it, 
nor the mixed confusion, consternation, surprise, and wonder with 
which the audience listened to it." LowelFs comment on the same 
occasion maybe found on page 17 of the Introduction. Dr. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes called it ^^The Declaration of Independence of Amer- 
ican Literature.'^ The address forms the best possible introduction 
to the study of Emerson, as it is in the nature of a preface to his whole 
philosophy of life. 

SELF-RELIANCE. 

Although the central thought of Self-Reliance had been incor- 
porated in several of Emerson's early occasional addresses, the essay 
first appeared in the present form in the first series of essays published 
in 1 84 1. The introduction in the Centenary Edition says: — "Thus 
it appears that the writings of Landor , . . may have given the orig- 
inal push towards the writing of this essay. A small portion of the 
essay came from the lecture on Individualism, the last in the course 
on the Philosophy of History, delivered in 1836-37, and other passages 
are taken from the lectures. School, Genius, and Duty, in the course on 
Human Life, 1838-39." 

After the study of The American Scholar the student will be pre- 
pared to meet Emerson's idea of self-trust which, as is stated on 
page 35, embraces all the duties of the scholar. The whole essay may 
in fact be presented as a development of one topic of the Phi Beta 
Kappa address. Three things, however, should be made plain at 
the outset; first, that Emerson is often led into seemingly extreme 
statements through his fear of weakening the effect of his expression 
of a firm conviction by qualifying it; second, that the student should 
endeavor to apply the author's own dictum to his study and inter- 
pretation of the essay, — to trust, as it were, his own reason in a meas- 



114 NOTh TUDY. 

ure; and third, tha^ i says, "Self-reliance is 

a misnomer ultimat ast in the constitution of 

the universe/' \ 

Of this last a word L. .leeds said. It must be remembered 

that all of Emerson's philosophy of the conduct of life is based on the 
idea that Nature, Man, and God are one, and that all that is best in 
man is his portion of the divine spirit. Hence, in trusting to self, he 
means to the highest self, or to the divine within man. So, as some 
one has said, self-reliance is God-reliance. We know the divine 
within us through intuition. This intuitive relation is the supernat- 
ural factor in man, the manifestation in consciousness of the universal 
spirit. This theory of intuition dominates the German literature of 
the time, and was interpreted to the English speaking world by 
Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. To this theory Emerson added, 
naturally enough, the conception that genius is "the true oracle of 
heaven.'' As Cooke says, "While the earlier mystics taught Emerson 
the doctrine of self-renunciation and dependence on God, all the 
later Germans he read taught individuality and self-reliance. He 
combined the two ideas and made them one." Hence, we have 
independence through dependence upon the promptings of one's in- 
most nature. In Letters and Social Aims he writes of this higher 
self, "and in this self-respect, or hearkening to the privatest oracle, 
he need never be at a loss. In morals, this is conscience; in intellect, 
genius; in practice, talent: not to imitate or surpass a particular man 
in his way, but to bring out your own new way." 

Whatever may be thought of the details of the working out of this 
philosophy, the essay is "a clarion call" to the best that is in young 
people. It arouses all the native aspirations of the individual. It is 
stimulating to feel that each of us has something within him which 
makes him "a new creature with a value of his own." 



COMPENSATION. 

No essay of Emerson's, as Bliss Perry remarks, opens more happily 
or more naturally than the one on Compensation. The ease and evi- 
dent pleasure with which he approaches his great subject make the 
essay seem to grow out of his long meditation now clarified and given 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 115 

definiteness by the incident of the sermon. This uncommonly at- 
tractive introduction may well serve as a model for the consideration 
of the student. 

This essay, like Self-Reliance which it immediately followed, ap- 
peared in 1 84 1 in the first series. Like most of Emerson's essays it 
is made up in part, as the opening paragraphs suggest, of thoughts 
which had long been in his mind and many of which had already been 
expressed in his Journal or elsewhere; but, unlike many of the others, 
it does not seem, as Dr. Edward Emerson notes, to have been de- 
livered previously in the form of an address as so many of the essays 
were. When the essay was written, Emerson had chosen his course in 
Hfe and had settled down to a quiet career as a thinker with the hope 
of doing his share of the world's work as a writer and lecturer. 
The death of his wife and of his promising brothers, Edward and 
Charles, and the mental and moral struggle of his withdrawal from 
the ministry had chastened but strengthened his spirit. He had a 
knowledge of love and sorrow; he had experienced success and disap- 
pointment; he had become a shrewd observer of affairs and of men, 
and had acquired the courage to analyze unflinchingly the cause of 
moral strength or weakness. Out of the fullness of these experiences 
and powers he wrote of retribution. 

Probably none of the essays has made a wider popular appeal, 
and none is more worthy of consideration, because of its human in- 
terest, its concern for the affairs of everyday life, its moral encourage- 
ment, and its inspiring appeal to obedience to universal law. Few 
of the essays deal with a profounder philosophy, yet none are handled 
with more freshness, directness, and simplicity. 

Its comparative simplicity of treatment and its richness in illustra- 
tion drawn from practical life should make the approach to the final 
philosophy easy. Many of the ideas expressed in the preceding essays 
are repeated here in a new setting. The whole thought grows out of 
the author's deep-seated optimism, his unwavering belief in the good- 
ness of things, in the necessity of obedience, and in the inevitableness 
of reward or puiiishment. "God cannot be cheated." All evil is 
evidence of the violation of law, and cannot long be hidden. All men 
are equal; all are great if obedient, because the soul is all that is, and 
circumstances are nothing. 



Ii6 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

Questions and Topics on The American Scholar. 

1. Find all you can about the Phi Beta Kappa Society to-day. 
What is the emblem of the society? Do you know any members? 
(Page 21, Note i.) 

2. Do we meet for games of ^^ strength or skill" to-day more than 
in 1837? (Page 21, 1. 3.) 

3. Are Americans too busy to give to letters to-day? Why were 
they especially busy in Emerson's early years? (Page 21, 1. 9.) 

4. Are there any signs of our ^^apprenticeship to other lands'' 
still remaining? (Page 22, 1. i.) 

5. What events in American life have since been ^'sung in song 
and story"? (Page 22, 1. 4.) 

6. Who of the great American writers had written previous to 
1837? (Page 22.) 

7. Do you infer that Emerson would believe in our present idea 
of specialization in education? (Page 22, 11. 29 ff.) 

8. Has the tendency been toward or away from the division of 
labor since Emerson spoke? (Pages 22-23.) 

9. What is the true purpose of work? Ruskin says, "When men 
are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as 
the color petals out of a beautiful flower." (Page 23, 11. 3-11.) 

10. Measured by his own definition, was Emerson a scholar? Are 
most pupils scholars? (Page 23, 1. 13.) 

11. Is Emerson's description of "the bookworm " the common idea 
of a scholar to-day? Do you know a "bookworm"? A real scholar? 
(Page 27, 1. 4.) 

12. If all men believed "the active soul" the only thing of value, 
what changes would be wrought in society? (Page; 27, 1. 15.) 

13. How can the average person become "a creator"? (Page 27, 
1. 18.) 

14. Why is " a strong head" needed for one who gets his wisdom 
only from books? (Page 29, 1. 18.) 

15. Do " the so-called ^practical men' " sneer at scholars in our 
day? Is it true that scholars are not "practical"? (Page 30, 1. 18.) 

16. In talking with people do you ever feel that some speak from 
experience; others, only from theory? (Page 31, 1. 2.) 

17. Do you find any evidences of Emerson's having used his knowl- 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY, 1 17 

edge of arts and sciences "to illustrate and embody his perceptions"? 
(Page 2>d>, 1- 3-) 

18. Did Emerson himself fulfill the true functions of a scholar — to 
cheer, to raise, and to guide men, by showing them facts amidst 
appearances? Do you think of any other duties of the scholar? 
(Page 35, 1. 2.) 

19. Compare the scholar's sacrifices with his opportunities. Is 
the reward worth the price? (Page 35.) 

20. Are men as willing in our time to be "brushed like flies from 
the path of a great person '7 Do we worship heroes? (Page 39, 11. 23 ff .) 

21. Is the seeking of money, or "spoils of office,'' characteristic 
of this generation? (Page 40, 1. 3.) 

22. In what traits is the boy like the ancient Greeks? (Page 41, 
1. 12.) 

23. Do you know of any instances where "Public and private 
avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat"? (Page 45, 1. 14.) 

Questions and Topics on Self-Reliance. 

1. What do you think of Emerson's definition of genius? Com- 
pare it with other definitions, especially with the familiar saying that 
it is "an infinite capacity for taking pains." (Page 49, 1. 5.) 

2. When in a man's education does the time come when he be- 
lieves envy springs from ignorance, etc.? In what sense is this true? 
(Page 50, 1. 4.) 

3. Why is man "clapped into jail" by consciousness? (Page 52, 

1.4.) 

4. Why do these inner promptings "grow faint as we enter the 
world?" Why does society destroy manhood? (Page 52, 11. 15 ff.) 

5. How far is it safe for the individual to refuse to conform to 
society? Could there be any government without the sacrifice of 
personal rights for the good of the whole? (Page 53.) 

6. Is Emerson uncharitable? Do you know of any instances 
of unwise giving? * Is it wise to give because it is expected of you? 
(Page 54, 11. 8-20.) 

7. Does Emerson think men should be judged by their actions? 
(Page 55, 1. 2.) 

8. Is it safe for the average individual to ignore what people 
think? (Page 55, 11. 8-16.) 



Il8 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

g. Can you think of instances when we "wear the fooHsh face of 
praise"? (Page 56, I. 17.) 

10. In what respect do newspapers direct men? (Page 56, 1. 30.) 

11. Can you recall any men in American History who have with- 
stood the opposition of both the cultivated classes and the masses? 
(Page 57, 11. 1-9.) 

12. Judging from these essays, were Emerson's writings consistent? 
(Page 59.) 

13. Can you mention other instances of institutions which are "the 
lengthened shadow of one man''? (Page 61, 1. 7.) 

14. Shall we not learn from the past? Can you formulate a state- 
ment of Emerson's idea of the value of History? (Pages 65-66.) 

15. In what sense does he mean that duty to self is higher than 
duty to society? Have you tried doing your whole duty to yourself 
for one day? (Page 70, 11. 6-12.) 

16. What are some of the "choices" made for us by society? 
(Page 70, 1. 30.) 

17. Can you mention instances of "sturdy lads" from the country 
who have surpassed the "city dolls"? Why have they succeeded? 
(Page 71, 11. 5-12.) 

18. Why is prayer to effect a private end "theft"? (Page 72, 1. 8.) 

19. What do you think are the purposes of travel? What did 
Emerson think? (Page 74, 11. 17 ff.) 

20. Are there any elements in our system of education that foster 
restlessness? (Page 75, 1. 15.) 

21. How do insurance offices increase the number of accidents? 
(Page 77, 1. 30.) 

22. Compare the men of to-day with some of the great men of an- 
tiquity. Which are greater? (Page 78.) 

23. What are some of the harms of the extensive use of machinery? 
(Page 78, 1. 17.) 

24. Is it true that we place too much reliance upon property? On 
what should we relie? (Page 79, 1. 21.) 

Questions and Topics on Compensation. 

I. We are told that the sermon was the immediate occasion of the 
writing of the essay, but do you find anywhere a statement of the 
purpose of the writing? (Page 85, 1. 21.) 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 119 

2. Have you ever thought the bad are successful? What deter- 
mines success? (Page 86, 1. 20:) 

3. Can you mention other illustrations of polarity? (Page 87.) 

4. What are some of the disadvantages and the compensations 
of your climate? (Page 88, 1. 14.) 

5. Have you gained something for everything you have missed, 
etc.? A good topic for a theme. Give specific instances. (Page 88, 

I. 23.) 

6. Do you know of instances where men of genius in their devotion 
to their work have neglected ^^ father and mother, and wife and child '7 
Why does Emerson think it is right? Recall King Arthur's devotion 
to the Round Table. (Page 89, 1. 20.) 

7. Cite instances where high taxes have yielded no revenue, where 
juries have declined to inflict severe legal penalties, and where private 
vengeance has taken punishment into its own hands. (Page 89, 

II. 29 ff.) 

8. Have you tried to escape the consequences of your own acts? 
Do you think you succeeded? (Page 92.) 

9. Is experience with the bitter side of life necessary to greatness? 
Think over the lives of several great men, Milton, Lincoln, Dante, 
and others. (Page 92, 1. 25.) 

10. Do you know any other proverbs that Emerson might have 
added to this list? (Page 96, 11. 26 ff.) 

11. From what enjoyment does "the exclusive in fashionable life'' 
exclude himself? (Page 97, 1. 19,) 

12. What is the cause of the fear that punishes? Fear of what? 
Does a man who is conscious of no wrong-doing fear? (Pages 
97-98.) 

13. What would be the result if all men believed that a swindler 
and a thief rob themselves? (Page 100, 1. 10.) 

14. How do opposition and blame and antagonism protect and 
benefit any one? Can you mention instances? (Page 102, L 17.) 

15. Apply Emerson's idea of compensation to cheating, and see 
why no one can be cheated except by himself. (Page 103, 1. 5.) 

16. How does the criminal receive punishment which we do not 
see? (Page 104, 11. 23-31.) 

17. Do you ever wish for ''the pot of buried gold," the thing you 
have not earned? (Page 105, 1. 20.) 



I20 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

/ 

1 8. Think of some men you admire and see how far they are mas- 
ters of circumstances? (Page 106, 11. 21 ff.) « 

19. Try to recall instances in which seeming disasters have proved 
blessings. (Page 107, 11. 20 ff.) 

Theme Topics. 

1. Was Emerson a Practical Man? 

2. Emerson — His Own Ideal of the American Scholar. 

3. Emerson and Thoreau as Lovers of Nature. 

4. Self-Reliance in the Lives of Certain Americans. 

5. Striking Instances of the Wisdom of Instinct. 

6. "Nature's Lawful Coin.'' See page 105, line 17. 

7. Traits of Emerson's Character Revealed in the Essays. 

8. "Room Alone and Keep a Journal." (Emerson's advice to all 
college students). 

9. Evidences of the Law of Compensation in My Own Experience. 

10. The Most Impressive Idea Emerson Has Given Me. 

11. The Use of Books — Emerson's Idea and Mine. 

12. What Some "Scholars" are Doing in this City. 

13. Are Our Scholars Practical Men? 

14. The Right Spirit and the Wrong Spirit of Foreign TraveL 

15. The Greek Goddess, Nemesis. 

16. The Law of Compensation in the Careers of Some Important 
Characters in My Reading (Brutus, Shylock, Sidney Carton, Silas 
Marner, Lancelot, King Arthur, Elaine, Orlando, Guinevere, Nancy 
Lammeter, etc.). 

Notes to the American Scholar. 

(Numerals in heavy type refer to the pages of the text, the lighter ones to 

the lines.) 

21 : Title. " The American Scholar " was one of Emerson's favorite 
themes. He spoke again at Dartmouth College in 1838 on " the 
resources, the subject, and the discipline of the scholar." In begin- 
ning he said, " Neither years nor books have yet availed to eradicate 
a prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and 
earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 1 21 

lead him directly into the holy ground where other men's aspirations 
only point." 

23 : 26. Nowhere is Emerson more poetic, more eloquent, than 
when describing Nature. Read the opening paragraphs of the essay 
on Nature. 

24: 12. Classification begins. Emerson had no sympathy with 
pure science, classification for the sake of classification. To him 
science was interesting and profitable only as it revealed the truth 
concerning the unity of all things. 

25:3. Soul of his soul. The epitome of Emerson's idea of Nature. 

25:29. Quick thought. Living thought. Compare "the quick 
and the dead." 

25: 29. It now endures, etc. Notice the three important functions 
of a book — to preserve, to spread, and to stimulate thought. 

26. By all means read Ruskin's definition of a book in Kings'^ Treas- 
uries, 

26: 27. Not from their own sight, etc. Emerson was a firm be- 
liever in the rightness of intuition. 

27: 27. The pure efflux of the Deity. Man becomes divine only 
when he becomes a creator. 

28:9. Genius . . . the enemy of genius. Why? 

28: 13. Right way of reading. Read also Ruskin's discussion of 
how to read in Kings^ Treasuries, 

28: 21. We hear, that we may speak. Holmes said that he talked 
to find out what he thought. 

29: 2. Abstraction of all time, i. e., they deal with ideas of per- 
manent interest. 

30: 7. Aim not to drill. Drill is only a means to give power to 
create. 

30:16. There goes in the world a notion, etc. Compare this 
statement of the popular idea of a scholar with George William 
Curtis' discussion of the same topic in " The Duty of the American 
Scholar," in Orations and Addresses, Vol. i, p. 7. 

30: 27. Without it, he is not yet man. Curtis speaks of Milton 
as the ideal type of scholar, because he forsook his scholarly delights 
to participate in the great Puritan struggle, and then out of his 
*' action " wrote his great epic, Paradise Lost. 

30: 31. Heroic mind. In the first year of the Civil War, Emerson 



122 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

said to the colleges, " Against the heroism of soldiers, I set the heroism 
of scholars/' Ponder their sacrifices described on pages 35 and 36. 

31:4. Other me. Read again his idea of the relation of Man and 
Nature, page 25. 

31:7. I grasp the hands of those next me, etc. Dr. Edward 
Everett Hale in his address on the ninetieth anniversary of Emer- 
son's birth gives many illustrations of Emerson's practical mingHng 
with affairs and with men. 

31:16. Drudgery, calamity, etc. Emerson always believed that 
he owed " much of the vigor, the rigor, and the manhood of his life," 
to his early struggles with poverty. Read Hale's anecdote on this 
point. 

31: 26. Not so with our recent actions. It is said that the his- 
torian Bancroft felt that he could deal impassionately only with 
the history of America previous to the Revolution. 

32: 27. If it were only for a vocabulary, etc. A paragraph well 
worth study for both thought and expression. 

33: 16. The idea of " Polarity " is further elaborated in Compensa- 
tion. 

33: 19. Each fit reproduces the other. Thought bears fruit in ac- 
tion; action gives rise to thought. 

34: 7. Not out of those, etc. Some one has said that the city draws 
its men of vigor largely from the boys of the country. 

34 : 12. Ruskin is another example of a man of culture who believed 
profoundly in the duty of manual labor. 

35: 2. Self-trust. In his Dartmouth address, Emerson said, "The 
whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by 
demonstrating what man can be and do." The idea is developed in 
Self-Reliance. 

35. Do you find here anything of autobiographical significance? 

36: 16. He and he only knows the world. All others are deceived 
by insignificant details of the moment. Curtis and Ruskin both 
speak of the need of the scholar's seeing beyond the present appear- 
, ances and resisting the whims of what Ruskin calls "the mob." 

36: 32. He has descended into the secrets of all minds, because 
Emerson believed all minds are one. 

37: 13. This is my music; this is myself. Compare with Ruskin's 
definition of a book, Kings^ Treasuries, paragraph 9. 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 123 

37: 18. Fear always springs from ignorance. Ci. Heroism. ^* Self- 
trust is the essence of Heroism." 

37: 27. Whelping of this lion, i. e., find the real nature of our fear. 

38: 9. Takes his signet and form. Cf. ^' One is seal, and one is 
print," page 25. 

38: II. Kings of the world. Read Ruskin's description of the true 
king in Kings^ Treasuries, paragraph 45. 

39: 13. In a century, etc. Edward Everett Hale says of Emerson, 
"There are possibly ten such men, probably not so many, in the 
nineteen centuries." 

39: 15. All the rest, etc. Emerson works out this idea in Repre- 
sentative Men, Cf., also, Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, 

40: 6. Wake them. This is the great problem of civilization — to 
awaken men to see the truth. 

40: 10. The main enterprise, etc. A statement of his belief in the 
eternal progress or evolution of mankind. 

41: 12. The boy is a Greek. He has the characteristics of the 
ancient Greeks. The history of the race is repeated in the individual. 

41 : 16. Age of Introversion. These were the times following 
Romanticism in poetry, one characteristic of which was subjectivity, 
or '^ the looking within." 

41: 18. Hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists. The 
scientific spirit of the Victorian period just beginning was influencing 
the poets to seek the reason for all things. See Tennyson's Flower in 
the Cranied Wall. 

41 : 30. Age of Revolution. The literary period just closing in 
1837 is frequently called the Revolutionary period because of its 
revolt against formalism. 

42:9. Elevation of . . . the lowest class. Emerson is speaking 
in the time of the great social and political reform in England. The 
Reform Bill in 1832 extended the franchise to the middle class. The 
slaves were freed in 1833. 

42:11. The near, the low, etc. The poets of the period, notably 
Wordsworth, were exalting the beauty and worth of common things. 

42: 23. Give me insight into to-day. Another illustration of the 
practicality of Emerson's idealism. 

42: 25. The meal in the firkin, etc. This passage admirably pre- 
sents Emerson's idea of the oneness of things. 



124 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY, 

44:6. Emanuel Swedenborg. Even while in college Emerson 
responded sympathetically to the teachings of Swedenborg. 

45: I. Help must come from the bosom alone. Cf. " Man is his 
own star." 

45: 16. See already the tragic consequence. Emerson blamed the 
scholar for many of the conditions that led to the Civil War. In an 
address during the first year of the war he said, " 'Tis because the 
scholars did not learn and teach, because they were traders and left 
their altars and libraries and worship of truth, and played the syco- 
phant to presidents and generals and members of Congress." 

45: 28. Patience, etc. A stirring appeal to young men to ^^ wake," 
and to beHeve in their own highest instincts. 

Notes to Self-Reliance. 

47. It was Emerson's custom to preface his essays with a poetic 
quotation, or a bit of his own verse, or with both, as in this case. 
Some of his best epigrammatic verse is in these prefatory stanzas. See 
the stanza preceding the essay on History, Oliver Wendell Holmes 
suggests that this is an impulse inherited from generations of minis- 
terial ancestors who were accustomed to using texts for their sermons. 

48. With all of Emerson's sensitiveness and delicacy of spirit, 
there went a profound admiration for ruggedness, the energy of 
earth, physical endurance, and power. Napoleon interested him more 
than any other man in history. He wrote, "These Hoosiers and 
Suckers are better than the sniveling opposition." Dr. Edward Emer- 
son in his address at the opening of Emerson Hall at Harvard, said, 
"But the mother- wit of an Irish girl, the shrewd courage of a hump- 
backed hostler, the confidence of a State Street merchant, the farmer's 
dealing with the clod, the chemist's with the crystal, were as sug- 
gestive to him as a page of Goethe." 

49: I. Eminent painter. The Centenary Edition suggests that 
either William Blake or Washington AUston is meant. Blake, es- 
pecially, was original. 

49: 18. Our own rejected thoughts. Ruskin says the average 
person reads to find his own thoughts expressed. 

50:14. Preestablished harmony. A technical term from the philos- 
ophy of Leibnitz, used in his attempts to explain the uniformity of 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 125 

the impressions made upon mind by matter as existing in a harmony 
established from the beginning. See Century Dictionary. 

51: 5. What pretty oracles nature yields us, etc. Emerson was a 
great lover of children and young people, and felt more at home with 
them than with his contemporaries. Wordsworth in his Ode on 
Intimations of Immortality beautifully expresses his faith in the right- 
ness of the instincts of childhood. Read the opening stanzas. 

51 : 26. He tries and sentences them, etc. Compare with the 
following from Education^ " They know truth from counterfeit as 
quick as the chemist does. They detect weakness in your eye and 
behavior a week before you open your mouth. ... If I can pass 
with them, I can manage well enough with their fathers." 

52: 5. Clapped into jail. Compare again with Wordsworth's Ode 
on Intimations of Immortality, stanza 5, 

"Shades of the prison house begin to close 
Upon the growing Boy." 

52: 25. Explore if it be goodness. Cf. i Thessalonians v. 21. 

53:11. Good and bad. Cf. Hamlet, II. 2, "There is nothing 
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." 

53: 12. After my constitution. Notice the double implication in 
" constitution " — the political and the moral sense of the word. 

53: 26. Spite at home. In turning your attention to things re- 
mote, you neglect things close by. Cf. " Charity begins at home." 

54: 3. I shun father and mother, etc. Cf. Matt. x. 37. 

54: 22. Man and his virtues, i. e., we usually think of men and 
their virtues as separate. 

55 : 14. Great man. Is not this a test of real greatness ? 

56: 24. Sour face. The first stroke of displeasure — the disap- 
proval of your associates. 

57:22. Motions. Natural impulses. Cf. " emotions." 

58: 6. To be great is to be misunderstood. Remember this epi- 
gram. Why is it true ? 

58:11. Acrostic, palindrome. "Madam, I'm Adam," and Na- 
poleon's remark, " Able was I ere I saw Elba," are examples. 

58: 13. Contrite wood-life, humble, simple life. Emerson withdrew 
to Concord to be able to lead a simple Hfe close to nature, 



126 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

59: 3. My book should smell of pines, etc. In his Journal in 1841 
he wrote, "All my thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream 
on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadows 
waved. Shall I not therefore call my little book Forest Essays? " 

59: 6. Character teaches above our wills. Our characters are 
influential for good or bad whether we wish it or not. 

60: 20. He measures you, i. e., the true man is the standard by 
which all are measured. 

60: 23. Takes place. An old expression for takes precedence of. 
See place in Century Dictionary. 

61: 7. An institution, etc. An example of one of Emerson's pithy 
sentences. It was his custom to work over such thoughts again and 
again until the expression suited the thought. He kept a book of 
such sentences which he incorporated in his essays as opportunity 
came. 

61 : II. All history, etc. Emerson's reading was largely biography. 
He loved the individuality in historic characters. It was his custom 
to copy anecdotes of famous people. Plutarch and his heroes were his 
delight. Dr. Holmes arranges the number of his references to great 
men in the following order: Shakespeare, Napoleon, Plato, Plutarch. 

61 : 14. Steal. Creep about. 

62: 15. Our reading, etc. We become flatterers of rank; we give 
too much attention to kings and princes and too little to common 
men. 

63: 2. Symbol, i. e., the king, a symbol of the power and dignity 
of man. 

63: II. Who is the Trustee? This paragraph needs careful atten- 
tion. It explains the whole ground of Emerson's idea of Self-Reliance. 
We should " obey " or " acquiesce " in the promptings of Instinct, 
which is the working of the ^' Over-Soul," or the Universal Mind, in 
our minds. Hence, " the Trustee," the " aboriginal self," is the 
Universal Mind. Elsewhere he says there is ^^ one mind common to 
all individual men," and " every man is an inlet to the same and to 
all of the same." 

63: 19. All later teachings, etc. Find Wordsworth's expression of 
this in the Ode on Intimations of Immortality. 

64: 9. Perceptions. This term is used to signify the application 
of the intellect to the facts of life. 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY, 127 

64: 12. My willful actions. He places instinct above reason 
always. 

64: 18. Fatal, inevitable, fateful. An old use of the word. Emer- 
son frequently uses words in their original sense. 

65: 4. Worship of the past. Emerson was a believer in the " thou- 
sand-eyed present." Genius, he says, is characterized by a neglect 
of yesterday and a " reliance upon the inspiration of to-day." 

65: 9. Apologue. iEsop's fables are good examples of apologues. 

65: 12. Ashamed before. Put to shame by. 

66: 7. His voice shall be as sweet, etc. The richness and the music 
of Emerson's voice impressed all who heard him. One who heard 
him preach in New Bedford says, "One day there came into our pulpit 
the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out 
the first hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read 
and prayed. Our choir was a good one, but its best was coarse and 
discordant after Emerson's voice." 

67: 5. Obedience. See Note 62,, line 11. 

67: 20. Power he defines elsewhere as " a sharing of the nature of 
the world." 

68:2. Beside. In comparison with. 

68: 3. Mob. Cf. again Ruskin's Kings^ Treasuries, paragraph 30. 

68: 6. We must go alone. All useful union must be purely within. 
Cf. "The union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated." 

68: 25. Resist our temptations. This is the negative or defensive 
side of self-reliance. 

69: 27. Rejection of all standard. When Emerson rejected the 
common standards of the pulpit, he was bitterly assailed on all sides 
as unchristian, an atheist, etc. 

70 : 4. Consider whether you have satisfied, etc. Consider the fine 
scorn of this passage. 

70: 24. No great and perfect persons. This subject is still further 
treated in Character. 

71:5. Sturdy lad. Another instance of his admiration of native 
power. See Note 48. 

71: 17. Ashamed of our compassion. Read Ruskin's treatment of 
this topic in Kings^ Treasuries , paragraph 36 — " You despise com- 
passion," etc. 

72:3. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, etc. One of 



128 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 

Emerson's stipulations in his occasional ministerial work was that he 
would offer prayer only when he felt moved to do so. 

72 : 9. Dualism. Man and God as separate instead of one. 

72: II. Prayer in all action. Cf. Sir Philip Sidney's, " God helps 
them who help themselves." 

73: 7. Creeds. Creeds bind the beliefs of man in groups or sects, 
while Emerson's philosophy says that each man should think and 
feel independently. 

74: 13. Pinfold. Cf. Comus, line 7, " Confined and pestered in this 
pinfold here." 

74: 22. Soul is no traveler. Emerson made trips abroad in 1831, 
1847, and 1872, but with none of them was he satisfied, for he con- 
stantly yearned for home and family. 

75: II. My giant. Explain what is meant by " giant." 

75: 17. We imitate. A reiteration of his belief in the individual 
and in the present. 

76: I. The precise thing to be done. Here we have the very prin- 
ciple of all art — the fitness of the thing produced to the environment 
and the thought. 

76: 10. No man yet knows, etc. Cf. Ruskin's definition of a book 
in Sesame and Lilies, 

76: 19. Colossal chisel. A transferred epithet. Colossal really 
applies to the product of the chisel. 

77: 2. Foreworld. An original or ideal state. 

77: 10. Something is taken. Cf. Compensation. 

78: 17. The harm of . . . machinery. Many of the thinkers of 
the Victorian Period questioned seriously the ultimate value of the 
wonderful advance in the use of machinery. Look up Ruskin's ideas 
on the subject. 

79: 25. Guards of property. Ex-President Roosevelt in his ad- 
dress before the French Academy in April, 19 10, said, " We must 
place human rights before property rights." 

80:8. Living property. Read Ruskin's discussion of "real treas- 
ures " in Kings^ Treasuries, paragraph 45. 

80: II. Thy lot or portion of life, etc. See second motto of Com- 
pensation. 

81: 3. Use all that is called Fortune, etc. This paragraph is an 
admirable summing up of all that has gone before. 



NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 129 

Notes to Compensation. 

83-84. In the two introductory stanzas are expressed the two es- 
sential phases of the thought of the whole essay; first, the dualism, 
"polarity," or balanced nature of the universe; and second, the in- 
evitableness of retribution. Notice, too, that in the first instance, 
though there is dualism in everything, there is also unity, as all things 
are alike; and that in the second stanza, beneath the compensatory 
philosophy, is the thought that man is above his environment. The 
imagery of the first motto illustrates the charm which astronomical 
phenomena always had for Emerson. 

84: 7. Deserts. Where is the accent? 

85: I. Ever since I was a boy. In the early days of his ministry, 
June, 183 1, he wrote in his Journal, " Is not the law of Compensation 
perfect? ... * The gods sell all things.' — ^Well, old man, hast got no 
farther? Why, this was taught thee months and years ago. It was 
writ on the autumn leaves at Roxbury in keep-school days — it sounded 
in the blind man's ear at Cambridge. . . . And I have nothing char- 
actered in my brain that outlives this word Compensation." 

86: 17. You sin now, etc. An illustration of Emerson's startling 
manner of expressing a generally half-realized thought. 

86: 24. Announcing the presence of the soul, i. e., he does not 
consider soul-success; he thinks only of material success. 

86 : 32. Men are better, etc. Another instance of Emerson's lack of 
confidence in so-called human institutions or systems. Cf . his idea of 
governments. 

87 : 4. Wiser than they know. Another way of saying that their 
instincts are better than their intellects. This furnishes the keynote 
to several essays. Cf. Pascal: "Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison 
ne connait pas." Emerson was a great admirer of the French philos- 
opher. 

87:8. Answered by a silence. May this sometimes be "the 
foolish face of praise "? See Self-Reliance, page 56. 

87: 13. This circle. The circle is the symbol of perfection and of 
eternity; hence, the perfect and eternal law of compensation. 

87: 14. Polarity. The law of contraries of Plato, and a prominent 
idea in the philosophy of Kant and Goethe. With Emerson it is one 
of the universal laws of nature. " Mind is with him the positive, and 



I30 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY, 

matter the negative expression of the Universal Spirit." Cf. the 
recent theory of ions. 

88: 14. Compensating errors. Error is here used in its etymological 
sense of wandering or deviating from the regular course. According 
to Lagrange's theory of the solar system each planet may undergo 
various changes in its orbit both in eccentricity and in inclination, 
but the balance of the whole system is always maintained. 

88: 23. For everything you have missed. Cf. Self- Reliance , page 77. 

89: 6. Intenerate. Another instance of the author's fondness for 
etymology. Look up the derivation of the word. 

89: 10. Cost him all his peace. Many of our presidents in recent 
years have expressed this thought. 

89: 14. Permanent. Why? 

89: 16. Charges of that eminence. Worries, cares. Cf. Gold- 
smith's The Deserted Village, lines 97-108. 

89: 18. Bear witness to the light. John i. 7. 

89: 20. Incessant. An example of the accurate use of words. 
Notice the active sense of the word as explained in the Century 
Dictionary. 

89: 23. A byword and a hissing. Another instance of Emerson's 
frequent use of Biblical phraseology. Emerson felt that he had in- 
curred this penalty by his devotion to truth. 

90: II. These appearances, etc. This and the following paragraph 
are passages often quoted to show Emerson's theory of the oneness 
of things. Though Darwin's Origin of Species did not appear until 
1859, the evolutionary theory was already in the air — the theory 
that all forms of life have developed from one original germ of 
life. 

90 : 30. The true doctrine, etc. Is Emerson a pantheist? Look up 
the word in the Century Dictionary. 

91:9. Ot KvfioL, etc. A fragment from a lost play of Sophocles. 

91: 13. Every secret, etc. See Introduction, page 19. 

91 : 19. Every act, etc. A difficult passage. The act and its reward 
or punishment are inseparable; hence, the two become one or are in- 
tegrated, first, because each act has its own reward in the doing of it, 
and second, it has its reward in a train of attendant circumstances. 
The intellect sees the circumstantial reward, but only the soul sees 
the real reward in the act itself. 



• NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. 131 

92: 21. Truck and higgle. See Century Dictionary. Both words 
are colloquial in New England in the sense of barter. 

93: 13. To try is to be mad. The attempt to separate the act 
from its retribution becomes an insane hobby that so acts upon the 
mind as to blind it to the actual truths. 

93 : 24. Fable. Emerson implies in the illustrations following that 
the essential truth of the myths, etc., is the reason of their survival. 

94: 1. Prometheus. For these stories in full, see Gayley's Classic 
Myths, or Bulfinch's Age of Fable, 

94 : 4. Of all the gods, etc. From -^schylus' Prometheus, 

95 : 9. All things are sold. Read LowelFs Vision of Sir Launfal, 
Prelude, lines 21-30, "Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us," 
etc. 

97: 9. Judges himself. Reveals what manner of man he is. 

97: 13. A harpoon. During his occasional preaching visits to New 
Bedford, Emerson became much interested in the adventures of the 
whale fishers. 

99 : 14. To ask for it. To get it for the asking. A household maxim 
with Emerson. 

99 : 30. Worm worms. Compare with the story of the storing up 
of the manna. Exodus xvi. 

100: 28. Budgets. The annual financial statement with an esti- 
mate of the necessary taxes for the ensuing year. 

100: 35. Exalt his business. An argument often used in these days 
to show the mental and moral value of manual and industrial training. 

101:1. The league, etc. An admirable paragraph. Study its 
structure. Emerson believed that all nature is moral. Professor 
Woodberry says his essays are "the best of lay sermons." 

loi : 4. No den, etc. Compare this passage with Webster's cele- 
brated discussion of the same topic in his speech in the White murder 
case. 

101:23. Winds blow and waters roll, etc. From Wordsworth's 
sonnet. Near Dover, 

102: 4. Thank his faults. This whole passage is transcribed from 
his Journal and is purely personal. He realized very keenly his own 
limitations, and often said they were elements in his success. 

102: II. Mends his shell with pearl. Look up the formation of 
pearls. See Century Dictionary. 



132 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY, . 

102: 25. I hate, etc. Another transcription from his Journal 
written two months after the bitter attack made upon him by the 
Boston clergy for his rather radical advice to young ministers in his 
Divinity School Address. 

103: 18. Read again Ruskin's discussion of a mob, Kings^ Treas- 
uries, paragraph 30. 

103: 19. Traversing. An uncommon use of the word in the sense 
of to thwart or to obstruct. 

103: 27. The martyr, etc. Remember that Garrison a few years 
previous was dragged through the streets of Boston. Has his com- 
pensation come? 

104: 5. What boots it to do well? Cf. Milton's Lycidas, lines 64- 

84. 

104: 13. Essence. Look up the derivation of this word, and see 
how Emerson has translated '^ Being '^ into its Latin equivalent, and 
has then followed it with God. A compact statement of the whole 
philosophy of the Universal Spirit. 

105: 2. Chaos. For the mythology of Chaos see Gayley's Classic 
Myths, pages 37-38. 

105 : 27. Nothing can work me damage, etc. A favorite maxim with 
Dr. Johnson. 

106: 25. The shellfish, etc. By all means read Holmes' The Cham- 
bered Nautilus, written in 185 1. The same thought is expressed in 
Longfellow's Excelsior, and in Spenser's An Hymne in Honour of 
Beautie, 

107: II. Force in to-day. This whole passage is another statement 
of Emerson's belief in the greatness of the present, and of his disre- 
gard of the past. See page 42, line 23. 



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literature. Methods of note- taking and of mnemonics 
are fully described ; and a highly suggestive and valuable 
chapter is devoted to language study. 
^ One of the most valuable chapters in the volume to 
most readers is that concerning courses of reading. In 
accordance with the author's new plan for the guidance 
of readers, a classified Hst of about fifteen hundred books 
is given, comprising the most valuable works in reference 
books, periodicals, philosophy, reHgion, mythology and 
folk-lore, biography, history, travels, sociology, natural 
sciences, art, poetry, fiction, Greek, Latin, and modern 
literatures. • The latest and best editions are specified, and 
the relative value of the several works mentioned is indi- 
cated in notes. 



AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 

(S. 106) 



OUTLINES OF GENERAL 
HISTORY 

By FRANK MOORE COLBY, M. A., recently Pro- 
fessor of Economics, New York University 



THIS volume provides at once a general foundation 
for historical know^ledge and a stimulus for further 
reading. It gives each period and subject its 
proper historical perspective, and provides a narrative 
which is clear, connected, and attractive. From first to 
last only information that is really useful has been included. 
^ The history is intended to be suggestive and not 
exhaustive. Although the field covered is as wide as 
possible, the limitations of space have obliged the writer to 
restrict the scope at some points; this he has done in the 
belief that it is preferable to giving a mere catalogue 
of events. The chief object of attention in the chapters 
on mediaeval and modern history is the European nations, 
and in treating them an eiFort has been made to trace their 
development as far as possible in a connected narrative, 
indicating the causal relations of events. Special emphasis 
is given to the great events of recent times. 
^ The book is plentifully suppHed with useful pedagogical 
features. The narrative follows the topical manner of 
treatment, and is not overcrowded with names and dates. 
The various historical phases and periods are clearly shown 
by a series of striking progressive maps, many of which 
are printed in colors. The illustrations are numerous and 
finely executed. Each chapter closes with a summary and 
synopsis for review, covering all important matters. 



AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 

(S. 125) 



COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY 

$1.25 

By HENRY GANNETT, Geographer of the United States Geologi- 
cal Survey and the Twelfth Census 5 CARL L. GARRISON, 
Principal of the Morgan School, Washington, D. C. ; and 
EDWIN J. HOUSTON, Emeritus Professor of Physical Geo- 
graphy and Physics, Central High School, Philadelphia. 



IN this book commercial geography is presented in a sim- 
ple, methodical, and logical way, to the end that its 
study shall be not only informative, but truly educa- 
tive and worth while. The treatment is divided into three 
parts: Commercial Conditions; Commercial Products; and 
Commercial Countries. The first portion gives a clear, 
brief statement of the physical, social, and economic con- 
ditions that largely influence commerce in every region. 
^ The second part treats of the cultivation of the soil, and 
of the vegetable, animal, and mineral products that enter 
commerce. The great commercial staples are taken up sepa- 
rately, and their production, manufacture, and use de- 
scribed. Diagrammatic maps and graphic diagrams are 
presented, showing where each staple is produced, and the 
percentage of the world's product supplied by each of the 
chief contributing countries. 

^ The final and largest division is devoted to a careful de- 
scription of each of the countries of the earth with special 
reference to its industries and commerce. Maps of the 
countries indicate the location of the chief industrial cen- 
ters, the trade routes, and the production areas. Diagrams or 
tables of imports and exports, etc., are also numerous. 
The present condition of the world's commerce is care- 
fully and accurately portrayed. 



AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 

(S. 144) 



DESCRIPTIVE 

CATALOGUE OF HIGH 

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

TEXTBOOKS 

Published Complete and in Sections 



WE issue a Catalogue of High School and College 
Textbooks, which we have tried to make as valua- 
ble and as useful to teachers as possible. In this 
catalogue are set forth briefly and clearly the scope and 
leading characteristics of each of -our best textbooks. In 
most cases there are also given testimonials from well- 
known teachers, which have been selected quite as much 
for their descriptive qualities as for their value as com- 
mendations. 

^ For the convenience of teachers this Catalogue is also, 
published in separate sections treating of the various branches 
of study. These pamphlets are entitled: English, Mathe- 
matics, History and Political Science, Science, Modern 
Languages, Ancient Languages, and Philosophy and 
Education. 

^ Teachers seeking the newest and best books for their 
classes are invited to send for our Complete High School 
and College Catalogue, or for such sections as may be of 
greatest interest. 

^ Copies of our price lists, or of special circulars, in which 
these books are described at greater length than the space 
limitations of the catalogue permit, will be mailed to any 
address on request. Address all correspondence to the 
nearest office of the company. 



AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 

(S.312) 



SSAii 2J jyii 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



